Melting crayon Art!

How cool is this?! My cooperating teacher from this practicum has done this lesson with a previous class and I thought it was so interesting that I wanted to share! What you do is glue crayons to a canvas and then melt the crayons with a hair dryer and the wax drips down the canvas which you then turn flat to let it dry. Then add decoration on the bottom! This is great because you could focus this lesson on colour schemes and themes (this is a spring picture, some students did blue crayons and made it an underwater scene by adding fish and weeds). This is great for showing students how to use materials for something other than what they are intended for! Very cool art project and it is something I will definitely try! 

One point perspective

This is the process of creating a one point perspective sketch. In this lesson students will learn about point of view, vanishing points, space, rhythm, dimension, and colour scheme. Students will be able to see how objects in the foreground and backgrounds must vary in size to really express that point of view. Now in this piece of art I first sketched my photo, then outlined it in black felt, and then I used chalk pastels to colour. Another technique that would be great for this is using the 'bleeding marker' technique with water based markers. Much like the chalk pastels this technique gives a very subtle colour effect that is really beautiful. 

Art with Mechanics

This Jeep belongs to a friend of mine and he has built this to his own specifics. This Jeep is not in the best condition and it had an extremely rusty hood. So to fix it, my friend was really creative by using pink duct tape to create a leopard style print on the hood to hide the rust and make it look unique and fun! I thought this was so amazing and I wanted to share it because it is artwork in a really unique way, working with an uncommon material. I have seen some amazing work with duct tape and this has to be one of the most creative art I have seen yet. Working with duct tape to create a piece of art would be something I would like to do in a classroom because it allows for ownership because you are creating a unique piece of art while practicing to work with uncommon artistic materials.

Note Values

This is something I saw a music teacher do in a grade 5/6 classroom. Students were learning about rhythm and notes. Students were practicing the different notes by clapping, while learning the different symbols that represent the notes.This was the way the teacher helped the students remember the different symbols. As you can see the sheet of paper has been folded into small squares that the students could write the notes on. I thought this was a great activity for those visual learners! Also it is something that the students can take ownership over because it is something they created themselves. 

Decorating Aprons

A little bit of fun at the Home Depot! We are decorating aprons with the kids workshops right now and it is such a blast! These are some employees artwork right now (mine included) and I wanted to share. This is a professional work environment so art and color is not always welcome in the store but due to the time of year we are allowed to have fun and decorate so we have taken advantage! It is small things like this where adults and children are allowed to express themselves freely through art that really make a difference! I believe this is true in the classroom as well, it is important to allow for free expression because sometimes that is where the best ideas come from! 

Incorporating Music in the Classroom

http://8tracks.com/
This is a wonderful music download website or app for your phone. This is great if you are looking for an easy way to use music in your classroom to use for transitions, clean up, brain breaks, etc. This site has every kind of music possible and it is sorted into categories for different moods, activities you are doing (ex. yoga), different times of the day. There are endless possibilities with this!

Garden of Eden

 

 

One of the exhibits at the Two Rivers Art Gallery right now is the Garden of Eden by Andrzej Maciejewski. There are some amazing photographs in this exhibition right now and I really enjoyed the different inquiry activities that we did with the pictures. You could easily do this with a class full of students and you could take the inquiry to so many different places. I thought the photographs from the exhibition could really inspire student to do an inquiry project on a number of different things. Looking closely each piece of fruit has a label on it exported from a different country. You could easily incorporate this exhibition cross curricula into arts, social studies, language arts, ect.

Pumpkins!!

That time of the year is coming!!! I made these pumpkins a couple years ago for Halloween and I just wanted to share them! Carving pumpkins was always one of my favorite things to do as a kid. I thought these two pictures show what kinds of different things you can do with pumpkins at different grade levels. The picture on top would be suited for younger grades mainly due to safety issues. With these tiny pumpkins students would be able to draw faces on their pumpkins without having to carve. The other picture would be suited to grades 6 and 7, again using appropriate carving tools. Specific instruction must be given to students before attempting this in the classroom. There are so many possibilities when it comes to Halloween!

Playing with pastels

Tonight I thought I would try my hand with oil pastels with inspiration from two famous artists! I do not want to go into too much detail on how I would use these in the classroom because they will be a part of my lesson plans assignment in class! I hope to have more drawings up soon!