DIY Accessories and Storybooks- Summer Camp!- BCA

Ah, summer camp. 

The joy and simplicity of art lessons that don't need grading, crafty projects with no agenda.  It is summer number nine for me at BCA, and my twelfth summer teaching art camps.

For example, duct tape purses: questionable educational value, but invaluable fun!

The first two camps of the summer I had the pleasure to teach were a DIY Accessories class and a writing+art class called Storybooks.

Fabulous ribbon headbands- all made by a single happy little camper.

No surprise, the DIY accessories class attracted all girls.  These ladies were very into all of the most glam-tastic options, including metallic spray paint, giant rhinestones, and feathers.

Feather clip-on earrings!

 The class was small, so they could really go all-out on projects- lots of hands-on help, plentiful materials, and many options of things to make each day.

Summery flower and tulle-ribbon headbands

 Each project could be customized in fun ways.  These headbands could be designed several different ways, and the girls added little extras like a bell or big ol' gems.

Fluffy ribbon barrettes

I took it back to the 80's for several projects, including these ribbon barrettes which were in a book I had as a kid, and friendship bracelets, the official staple of summer camps nationwide.

Made, obviously, by looping it around your foot or toe.

I stopped us short of sewing scrunchies, because even though I made dozens of them as a kid, it turns out that they didn't actually look good.  At all.

Not me- but I wore my hair like this all the time. Oh, well. At least it matched my tube socks.

The campers were not so into projects that involved sewing. They vastly preferred the immediacy of every crafter's best friend, the hot glue gun.

Yes, I let small children use hot glue guns. Yes, they sometimes touch it by accident.  And yes, they go right back to using it again, because like other real and satisfying tools (saws, sewing machines, drills, hammers), there is an substantial element of self-confidence that rises out of knowing that they are trusted with a potentially dangerous tool. It builds their sense of responsibility, especially knowing that they can teach that tool to others.

Bejeweled ribbon belt, brought to you courtesy of a hot glue gun.

The spray paint we used helped the girls make these gorgeous wooden bangles.

And this one, which deserves its own closeup, for the tiny owls drawn on afterward.

Why owls on a bracelet? Because she's eight, and she rocks.

Designs made this week ranged from the sweet...

to the fierce.

Made by a seven-year-old. What?! I want that.

There was so much more. More earrings, more hair bows, more projects we couldn't even get to this week because they were such busy bees.

A couple of the same campers were with me all day, and for the other half we did Storybooks. Many of these kids are such writers, from their souls, that it blew me away. They came loaded up with stories in the mind and tales to tell, and all I really did was provide a platform for them to put the stories forward.

First page of a pop-up book. Watch out Robert Sabuda!

My job, as I saw it, was to introduce interesting book formats that stimulated the artists to conceive of its content.  For example, we made these books with pages offset slightly from one another, a style which lent itself well to acrostic poetry, counting, chapter, or alphabet books:

 Students made field guides, which could either be based in reality or in their own imaginations:

We experimented with different types of book binding, including sewing with a needle+thread, using a hole punch+embroidery floss, and straw+rubberbands:

Hole punch+embroidery floss binding, with a styrofoam print cover illustration

Artists also tried several different ways that book printers make fancy papers, such as marbling and bubble printing:

       Folded journal-style book with Velcro closure. Several kids used this for non-fiction fact books with glossaries.

Anyway, are you still with me? Thanks! This post is long, but barely touches the tip of the art-iceberg produced by my lovely campers this week at Burlington City Arts.  Welcome summer!

Kindergarten Color Mixing and Life Cycle Observation! RES

There are a few more RES projects I want to make sure to share.  

These color-mixing masterpieces are one of those.

Kindergarteners have been working all year to learn how to mix colors from just the primaries.  It's a skill that I support by trying as often as possible to give only those colors to students. In this project they had access to the primary colors plus white.

Look at that sweet little table upon which the artist perched the vase, and that little window!

There was a lot going on in this deceptively simple still-life. We looked Van Gogh's paintings of sunflowers, and at a basket of sunflowers in the classroom as well to identify basic parts of the plant.  We also talk about the roles of the different plant parts- the leaves gather sun, the stem acts like a straw, etc.  We refer to the plant parts as we paint to identify the colors we see and talk about how to mix them.

This project began with tracing. Yup, tracing. I discovered a couple of years ago that an astonishing number of my older students in grade two actually couldn't  trace a shape, and it alarmed me that as much as we devalue tracing as a culture, it is an important skill.  Essentially, using the edge of a ruler is tracing.  If you are only near the edge of it, and not tracing  it, the line will not come out straight, thus defeating the point of the ruler itself.  So, I created a couple of projects that integrate tracing as a skill, and begin teaching it in Kindergarten.

What they have traced here is the vase shape.  I made several different shapes and sizes of vases, and the students begin by selecting and trying to trace all the way around the shape, rotating their paper halfway and keeping their pencil on the edge of the shape.

Students add flowers, beginning with the seed centers, which students noticed were circles. Depending on where the flower was in its life cycle, some of the flowers were upright, arching, or altogether droopy.  When students added stems, petals, and leaves, we discussed ways to use those plant parts to give more information about each flower's point in its life cycle.  We also branched out from sunflowers, experimenting with the shapes of the petals.

Our last step in pencil was to add a surface on which the vase was sitting.  We observed the sunflower basket in the room and talked at length about how to make the vase appear to be fully sitting on a surface. We noticed that when an object sits on a surface, that you cannot see the full back edge of the surface, because the object is visually overlapping it.  So, we tried to make our vases overlap the tables upon which they sat.

When we got to color mixing, we identified colors and plant parts we observed. Students used the color wheel to mix green first for their stems and leaves, then, using leftover green, added red to make brown for the seed centers. 

The petals were painted the artist's choice of colors, as were the background, vase, and table.  Some students added patterns of dots or stripes to the vases and tables as well.

The focus was on allowing students to experiment with their color mixing for those elements. We varied the size of brush we used as well for the different parts of the painting.

The last step was outlining the elements with black marker to help the colors and shapes stand out and "pop" visually. Whew!  These hardworking artists ended up with incredibly beautiful and well-earned results. 

Goodbye RES! My Own Love Note.

 Dear RES,

       What a lovely family of students, colleagues, and families with whom to spend five years.  I am so lucky. This morning when getting ready for work, I decided to skip the eye makeup.  After work I was attending a friend's retirement party, and I didn't want to show up with raccoon eyes from crying about leaving all of you lovelies.
      Good thing, too, because right at the end of the day, when everything was high and dry on my face, this happened- a love note from the whole darn school!

 What are all those little dots on that board?  Thumbprints.  Here they are closer:

If it hard been a card that they all signed, that would be lovely, and I'd have been fine, but no. Thumbprints. It was too much. I got through the last class, had lots of hugs, and cried my pathetic sobby way home.

Because I know all of those thumbprints. They have been all over my classroom, my artwork, and my clothes all year. Little thumbs covered in paint left printed on my tables. Pressed onto my cabinets while leaning and waiting in line.  Washed from the soap dispensers.  Smudging the mirrors.  Pressed on my skirts from eager hands tugging.  Stamped onto my own artwork, examples passed about and clutched tightly.

I know those thumbprints, and I will miss them all.

Thank you for welcoming me into your community, into your school, and for letting all of those little thumbs print right on my heart.

Love, sparkles, and delightful mess,

Mrs. Elliott

P.S. Please excuse me for being a mush.
P.P.S. Thanks for indulging it today.

This. This is why I am an art teacher.

UseItUp! Masks- RES

What does an art teacher do at the end of the year when you have a little of this, a little of that, and tub of construction paper scraps?  Make some zany masks, of course.

These are nothing groundbreaking, nothing revolutionary, but if you ask a second grader at RES they will likely say it was the most awesome project ever!

Step 1: Give the kids a some background info on mask-making traditions around the world. I took a pretty wide brush with this, as there are so very many cultures with vastly differing mask traditions.

 Step 2: Use a large, vertically oriented piece of construction paper, fold it in half, and cut out an interesting shape for the head.

Step 3:  Focus on a feeling you want the mask to give: Fierce? Sad? Silly? Angry?

Step 4:  Give kids access to everything but the kitchen sink, so to speak. Glitter? Sure! Pom poms, yarn, pipe cleaners, feathers, markers, paper curling machine, hole punches, paper scraps? Yes.

This lesson spanned only two classes here at the end of the year.  The second graders just felt so free in this activity, it felt so open, creative, and experimental for them. They are super proud of their work, because each mask is quite different and generated from their own imaginations.

 The part they seemed to enjoy best was walking around the room to see the choices other artists were making.
I love that tongue!  
How did you make those teeth?
It's neat how the nose is 3D!

I loved how happy this little lesson made them. It's frankly the type that I avoid- I fear inappropriate cultural appropriation and misunderstanding of traditions. But I think I need to work to acknowledge that this is also a lesson that makes students feel so imaginative and satisfied!

It's portfolio week, so all of these, along with their other artwork, is coming home soon! 

Enjoy their zany creations!

Perspective Taking- Post #100! RES

As I have come to this 100th post, I have had a lot of time to reflect this past year on my teaching. That's been the best part of blogging.

I love teaching art. It might make me sound like a loon, but rarely, even in childhood, did I ever imagine doing anything else. Some days are hard- it's a messy, fast-paced job that is full of endless surprises and twists, both good and bad.  I go to bed pretty dang early to keep up with it.

But many, many days I drive home thinking to myself thoughts such as, "Well, that was a really great day. The kids had fun, the new lessons I tried are working, and I have tricked them into integrating math without knowing it."

Lots of my students tell me that they "hate math." It seems to be, by far, the most vastly disliked subject in the informal polls of one another that children do when they have a moment to chat (e.g. "Raise your hand if you like..."). To me, this is a terrible shame- it's my next favorite school subject after art.

In my eternal effort to engage learners in subjects they "hate," I try to integrate content areas into art- both to bring art-doubters an in-road to using their visual strengths, and also to use the arts as an avenue for growth and exploration in other subject areas.

To be honest, I know what I want my classroom to look like, what I want my learners to love, so when I fall short it is especially frustrating, so I try to take their perspective and understand what didn't work and why. 
 

Perspective drawing.  Seeing things from a single view point.  Not your own. You and I cannot stand side by side and see exactly the same thing. Say we are looking at a small wooden block. You'll see one side of it, but I might see a different face of it. We have to literally stand in one another's shoes to see things exactly the same way as the other person.

It's also what we hope to teach our students to do- think about someone else's thinking, and adjust and modify behavior, words, and choices accordingly. 

So, maybe I love math, and all these angles and lines come naturally. Maybe that child doesn't.  Or he's tired. Or she's hungry. Or someone sitting next to him is making it look "easy" and he is afraid his won't be as "good."

So we adults- teachers, parents- push, then hug, then push again. We raise the bar, then listen and compromise when it is out of reach. Then we adjust it for the next person in line. Or we readjust it again for the same child to a different spot, because it is a new day, or a different moment.  That's parenting. That's teaching.

This lesson.  Make 5-7 geometric, straight edge shapes that disappear to a single vanishing point.
This is hard, Mrs. Elliott.  Maybe so. Don't forget to use your ruler.

What else, Mrs. Elliott? Try curving shapes, they are much trickier.
This is hard, Mrs. Elliott, curved shapes don't have corners. I know. Keep trying.

What else, Mrs. Elliott? Try stacking them inside of each other, like they are hollow.
This is hard, Mrs. Elliott. Don't forget that all the lines that aren't faces connect to your vanishing point.

What else, Mrs. Elliott? Try creating a light source, let shadows and values add dimension and volumes.
This is hard, Mrs. Elliott. Use a scrap paper, you won't smear your pencil as easily.

What else, Mrs. Elliott? Cut off your shapes into prisms, so that they look like they are bursting out from the center.
This is hard, Mrs. Elliott.  No joke. I didn't draw like that until the end of high school.

Your students knock my socks off. 

They bring out the best in me, and it has been a pleasure to teach here at RES. 

I will miss all of your children, and look forward to visiting next year.

Thank you, thank you, for letting me be a part of your school community.