Guess who's presenting!?

That's right!  I'm a presenter for this year's Art of Ed Winter On-Line Conference!  I'm so excited and honored to have been asked to do this!  Check out the list of presentations here!  I will be presenting on how to ROCK the sketchbook in your classroom! :)

Kindergarten Mondrian Collages

Reverting back to a good-ole staple in my Kindergarten curriculum!  We did these Mondrian collages as a review of cutting and gluing, but also of geometric shapes, with corresponds with the Common Core math standards in kindergarten (identifying shapes).  Another thing that corresponds with those math standards?  Vertical and horizontal lines!  Boy, if you could have seen the shock on my face when I presented Mondrian to the students.  I asked the question, "What do you notice about the lines that Mondrian uses?" and the first response I received was "They are vertical and horizontal!"  WOW!

I'm not going to get into how we created these because I've posted about it in the past.  You can also read up on how I've used Mondrian in previous projects here.

2nd Grade: Fairy Tale Self-Portraits

And here's the second self-portrait project for the year!  The first Common Core listening and learning strand in 2nd grade is Fairy Tales and Tall Tales.  Last year, we created a collage of Beast's Castle from Beauty and the Beast.  This year I decided to take the self-portrait approach and have students paint themselves as kings, queens, princes, and princesses from a fairy tale.

This project took a total of three days.  On the first day, students used a mirror to draw their portrait in pencil.  On the first day and second day, they used a skinny brush to paint their outlines with black paint.  The second and third day was devoted to painting their portraits.  I told students to paint their backgrounds a single color, for the sake of time, but you'll notice that a few students had enough time to get a little more creative with their backgrounds.  :)  This project proved to be a great one for teaching students how to make smart choices with the type of paint brush they pick for a painting.

Art 7: Acrylic Graffiti Piece

Ok, Mrs. Impey...it's time to get back into your blog!  I don't know what it is about this year, but I am so UNORGANIZED it isn't even funny!  It must be the 1-year old toddler I have running around EVERYWHERE!  I am so backed up on artwork...getting it graded, photographed, up on Artsonia, and on my blog!  

These are my 7th graders graffiti projects from this year.  Last year, we did the final project on the cover of their sketchbooks.  This year, I had them do it on 10" x 14" canvas board, and I like the results much better!  You can look back at last year's project to get the gist of the planning behind this.

Of course, after I had already completed this project, I attended the NYSATA conference and one of the workshops I attended was about graffiti.  I'm SO EXCITED about the new concepts and techniques I learned...I wish I could do this unit all over again!  One of the websites I learned about is Graffiti Creator.  From what I understand, it's been around for a while, but I don't know how I missed it!

Usually, I have the students free-hand all of their lettering, and I usually only get a hand full who are naturally talented with the wildstyle fonts.  Next year, I plan on having them do the brainstorming process to come up with their tag name, and then, instead of designing everything from scratch, I'm going to let them play around with the Graffiti Creator website!  Once they've designed a tag, they will then transpose it from their print-out to their canvas.