Welcome summer!

Phew, the end of the school year felt like it took forever to get here!  I thoroughly enjoyed my first full week of vacation this last week, catching up on gardening and cleaning.  Go figure that I finally have my energy back now that school is out!

My summer is filling up pretty fast and this year I am intentionally not doing anything for school until the middle of July!  Last year I got right to work working on curriculum and such, but I know this year coming up is going to be hectic for me, what with being pregnant and being switched to K-12 art.  It's hard to stay off Pinterest to keep from brainstorming high school art curriculum ideas, but I need to keep myself away from that for a bit.

So far, my hubby and I have accomplished a lot around the house this last week.  I planted some more in my gardens, cleaned up our guest room and finished cleaning out the room that will become the baby's room.  We also cleaned our kitchen and living room top to bottom!  Now it's finally time to relax a bit!

This week my brother and his fiance are coming to visit for the 4th of July.  We'll probably hit up the Renaissance Festival and work on ripping out the walls to replace insulation in the baby's room (and by we, I mean my hubby and brother!).

The middle of July will hold our annual family reunion, which should be fun (it's Gilligan's Island themed this year!) and then the beginning of August will be by baby shower back home in Buffalo, NY.  I'm so excited!

I have one more complete week of relaxation until the summer program starts at my school for four weeks.  I work three hours a day, Monday-Friday doing arts, crafts and cooking with the kids.  I'm also hoping that we'll be able to continue on the mural we started last year!  Until then, hope everyone is having a fun and relaxing summer!

Here's a peek at my growing belly!  You'll also notice from my photos that I chopped off approximately 12" from my hair!  This is the shortest it has EVER been!  I was a bit emotional about it, but it's so darn hot I couldn't stand the long hair anymore!  I'm donating it to Pantene's Beautiful Lengths program, so it's going to a good cause!

Spring/Summer Birch Trees

Here's our last 3rd grade birch tree project.  For this one I didn't give them any directions, other than it had to be a spring/summer landscape with birch trees!  This was like the "test" birch tree project, since we didn't review depth before starting.  I don't have any watercolor pencils, but I decided to let the kids use regular colored pencils if they wanted instead of crayon.  They worked pretty well!  If you haven't already seen them, here are all of our other birch trees from this year:

Fall Birch Trees (Students received full instruction and demonstration.)

Winter Birch Trees  (Students received review of depth.)

I wish some of the students paid more attention!  I had a few really great landscapes that had blank birch trees!

Kindergarten: 4 Seasons Project (Picture Heavy Post!)

Here is the plan for that Four Seasons project I am doing with the kinders, in conjunction with Monet.  As I said before, some teachers stepped up to the plate and read or will read a book about an artist during read-a-loud in class.  Two kinder teachers chose Monet.  When they came to me and asked who a good, easy artist might be to cover, I asked what they were learning in class.  Currently, they are working on the seasons and weather unit from the Core Knowledge listening strand curriculum.  Right away, I knew Monet would be a good artist for them to read about.  He loved to paint outside, he painted in all types of weather, seasons, and times of day.  

So, this project will span out over the course of 4 days.  The first two days will revolve around reviewing what trees look like in the four seasons, and painting a background for each tree.  We'll also paint a tree, without leaves, on each background.  This won't necessarily take up a whole lot of time each class, but I'm using the rest of class to really teach and push cleaning up with paint to the kinders.  They're really good at cleaning tables now, but now we need to work on cleaning brushes and paint palettes.  In fact, Phyl over at There's a Dragon in my Art Room just did a post about clean-up, and it's fantastic!  I already do some of what she suggests, but I may take a few other pointers from her!

Anyways, here is what the students will be doing on days 1 and 2:

Day 1 will be the winter and spring trees...I do the demo first on how I want them to paint the background, and then they do it.  We did both backgrounds first, and then went back in and painted the trees.  I did not give the demo on painting trees, because they should already know how to do those 'y' and 'v' trees we worked on in the cherry blossom unit.

Day 2 will be the summer and fall trees.  Backgrounds are pretty similar, but I'm going to have them add some textured clouds, I think, for the summer tree and instead of doing light blue and white in the fall sky, I'll have them do light blue and dark blue.

Now here's the fun part.  I've seen bubble wrap printing all over Pinterest.  This particular pin is what really inspired this project.  On day 3, I will set up stations around the room at the tables.  Each table will be a different season.  We will write the seasons on the back of each tree so students can take the correct tree to the correct station to add the leaves/snow.

Winter trees will have white snow...I'm going to change the shape of the bubble wrap for this one so it's not a circle but a rectangle so it looks more like snow and less like white leaves...

Spring trees will have green leaves and pink buds...

Summer trees will have green leaves...

And obviously fall!

When I made these prints, I used the block printing ink that I have.  I'm not entirely sure I'm happy with the results, especially with the green.  I may change it to regular tempera paint.

On the last day, day 4, I'll have the kiddos glue these all down onto black paper.  I think one class will glue them down in a straight line, winter to fall, and the other class will do a 2x2 setup.