Today's Featured Resources: The SmART Teacher

I recently started using the SmART Teacher website.  If any of you haven't heard of it, it a great resource for teachers to share lesson plans and participate in chats about various subjects in art.  You create a profile and from there you can create discussions, lessons and visuals to share with other teachers.  You can also win prizes for submitting your lessons!

They run two contests a month and each contest usually has 2-4 winners.  All you have to do is create a resource or two based on what the contest criteria is. Winners are chosen based on how in depth and helpful your resource is, as well as how many people on the site "like" or "keep" your resource.

I won one of the contests in October and today I have one of the featured resources! I'm so excited!  I was one of the winners for the printmaking resource project sponsered by Gelli Arts so of course, my prize is some Gelli plates!  I'M SO EXCITED!  I can't wait to get these!  Everyone has been raving about them! Hopefully I'll have them in the next few weeks!

The lesson I won the Gelli Plates for was my Celery Stamp Roses that I did last year with my 12:1:1 class.  I'm sure many of you have seen this before on Pinterest, that's where I saw how to make a celery look like a rose!

My lesson that is featured today is my Fall Leaf Prints.  I did this project my first year of teaching, two years ago.  I'm doing it again this year, but I changed the way I had them do their drawing for the center.  In the featured lesson I created, I had them draw "Y" trees in 4th grade.  This year, however, I showed them how to draw trees a little more realistically and I required them to use value in their drawings as a follow up to our value cities.  These drawings are much more advanced than the ones in my previous project, so I'm definitely happy with the changes I made!  This year, we are currently in the process of carving out our leaves in the lino blocks.  Hopefully I'll have more to share on this project at the end of the upcoming week!

 Drawing their leaves onto their lino blocks. 

Some of the finished leaves on the lino block.

These are some of the early finishers...despite only spending two class periods on these drawings, they're pretty good.  These particular students are already using better value than in their city drawings.

This one is really great!  This student really understands the concept of shadows!  Now I just have to work on getting him to have a better composition!

More pictures to come once we get a little farther into the project!

Burlap Sewing

So, by the end of the day today, it finally caught up with me.  And when I say it, I mean "the sickness"!  This morning I went in, feeling a little tired from all of yesterdays Halloween festivities at school and after school...by 1:00, I had no voice!  Yup, that's right, laryngitis has set in!  This is the third year this has happened to me...and each time it happens at a different time of year.  Once in April, last year at the end of September, and this year at the beginning of November!  Ugh!

It really stinks too because I had just gotten approval from my administrators to have my brother's girlfriend come in tomorrow to "observe" me and help out!  (They are coming five hours to visit this weekend, so rather than have them sit around the house I thought it would be cool to have them come to school to see what I do!) Then, at the end of the day, I had to go down to the Superintendent's office to ask her secretary to call me in a sub for tomorrow because I can barely whisper! (Yeeks!  Hopefully they could tell that I really wasn't sounding well and wasn't trying to get off work because I was going to have visitors!) Bring on the tea, humidifier and chicken soup broth!

Anyways, because of my voice issue, which, by the way, all the kids were making fun of me for because when I tried to talk I sounded very manly...I had to do something quick and easy for the after school program I am part of.  

I had a group of students who needed to finish their burlap sewing, so that needed no words; they just got their stuff and started to work.  Sand art is always a great back up plan too!  That's what everyone else did if they chose to come to the art room after school.  (I have a bunch of pre-printed sand art boards that have pictures on them for emergencies.)

 Not sure what the "inside joke" was for this, but it's supposed to say, "I <3 Bacon" (left).  I love the one on the right...this student did a little sewing, plus used pipe cleaners and feathers.

Another creative design using feathers and buttons.

This one should be rotated, but alas blogger is being photo dumb.  A little difficult to see it but this one was an attempt at a dragon.  Pretty good for a first time sew!

Another sewn burlap project and one of the sand art projects.

More posts to come this weekend as I get my photos uploaded and I get crafty with my visitors!

Glass Art

I found some of the pictures I had tucked away from last years glass plates the kids made.  There are only a few...I can't really remember why I didn't take more pictures of these!

This plate was made with black glass and red glass.  I tried to tell him that he probably wouldn't be able to see the red after fusing, but he wanted to try!

This one used cut glass shapes, noodles and frit.

I loved this one!  Since glass art is new to me, I looked up a bunch of pictures to print off to give the kids ideas of what they could create with glass.  A few of them did a little copying from the examples to get what they wanted, but I figured since it was new to me and they were having a hard time seeing how the little random shapes could create a picture, I let them as long as it wasn't a direct copy.  (Blogger won't let me rotate the picture!)

Another picture I can't get to rotate...this girl came up with the idea of kissing fish on her own after seeing fish examples.

This one was a creation by one girl...all on her own!  I loved it!  

I had meant to auction these plates off, but last year was a lot of trial and error with my glass kiln and we kind of wasted a lot of glass.  If you don't use kiln paper under the glass, you have to chip off and reapply the kiln wash after every fuse and slump you do!  It's A LOT of work, even if you only have one shelf!  Plus, you need to wait for the kiln wash to completely dry or it will cause air bubbles to rise in your glass as you fuse it and then you will have swiss cheese holes!  It was very frustrating to lose all that glass as it is very expensive, but luckily I was able to use grant money this year again to really stock up on the glass!  Annnnd on kiln paper, as that seems to be the safest route to go with fusing!

This year I hope to do a little experimenting with glass cuff bracelets.  I also bought some nice jewelry kits to use in the big kiln.  Can't wait to start up art club to dive into this stuff!