Valentine Ice Cream Sundae

Certain holidays in my opinion allow a teacher to get a little crafty! I cannot resist making Valentines! This week we made these “Valentine Sundays” I got this idea from a similar lesson online.

I covered cotton balls in powdered tempera first.

Then each student makes the straw out of a small paper like this.

Then we used Crayola Model Magic for the cherry, and a piece of green wire for the stem and dip it in liquid watercolor

glue a white cotton ball for the Whipped Cream

You can use a doily or a paper heart for the “plate”

And VOILA, an ice cream treaty for my Valentine sweeties!!

Hearts, Eyes, Mermaids, and MLK!!

We have been having lots of fun with HEARTS! This week we have been making warm/cool color heart paper weavings! I gave them bright colored paper and they had to color one cool color heart and one warm color heart. Then they cut them and wove them together.

Kinder and first have been studying how to add emotions to our artwork. They draw a lot of people in social studies and will be making self portraits later this year, so I thought this would be a great prep exercise! We did a group collage of different emotions.

I tell them the letter “V” above the eyes makes them look mad. We scrunched our eyebrows and felt them on our faces. Then we felt our cheeks go up and down when we smiled and stopped. We drew Humpty Dumpty on tag board, and then they cut him into pieces like a puzzle. They traded puzzles with friends when they finished.

One of my fifth graders made this card for our counselor.There is a tiny frame on the desk that says #1 Counsellor, a coffe mug with coffee in it, a computer, mouse, printer, and even framed ART on the wall! She used the fold that we did for the Spooky houses, (here is the step by step )http://elementaryartfun.blogspot.com/2009/11/spooky-houses.html

Okay, I am a freak about eyes. I have just started this exercise with second grade, but am going to do it with 3rd-5th too. We looked at lots of pictures of eyes first.

We talk about how they are 3d and the form is called a sphere

They learned the parts of the eye, pupil, iris, eye lid (like windshield wipers to keep them clean), eye lashes, and reflection of light. We talk about the light source, and how the reflection should be a rectangle if its a window.

I took a picture of a student and we looked at his eyes up close. I showed them how you can change the color in Photoshop.

Then they used oil pastels to draw eyes!

Kinder-2nd made these mermaid drawings with sparkly paper tails!

I wish I could have photographed more of them, they were so cute!

When we came back from MLK Holiday we talked a lot about Civil Rights, Equality, and watched a video of MLK Jr. giving his I have a dream speech.

We made these crayon resist paintings and students wrote words around them like freedom, equality, peace, love, tolerance..

Thanks Bloggers!

click on the wordle above or go to http://www.wordle.net/! type in your blog and create your own!

WOW!

I love blogging!

I want to thank my blogging buddies for taking the time to post your lessons and insight on your blogs, because it has been such a great resource for me and my classroom! I have gotten so many tips, ideas, class management strategies, feedback, display ideas, and more. I look forward to looking at your blogs everyday and seeing the new posts! As an art teacher, we don’t always have a team in the building to discuss ideas and plan with, so I feel like you are my “team” If I don’t have your link please send it to me, so I can add to my blog roll as I am going to update it this week!

I was reading today the current “Blogsphere” tracked by http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000436.html

here are some COOL Stats on blogging:

-there are 50+ million blogs now, which is over ONE HUNDRED times bigger than it was only 3 years ago.

-the number of blogs doubles every 6 months

-175,000 blogs created every DAY

-more than 2 blogs are created every SECOND worldwide

-3% of the US population blogs

-25% of Google links are generated by blogs- giving blog owners a higher profile than website owners

I am excited to share what I have learned about blogging with my fellow elementary art teachers in my district at our next meeting! Maybe there will be a few new bloggers to add to the family and become one of the daily 175,000 newbies in the stats!!

Snow Day?

Thursday we were informed that school would be cancelled Friday because

of a winter storm. Everyone was excited about the 80% chance of snow! We never get snow in Houston, so that was a BIG deal! It was supposed to snow at night, so could expect to wake up and see the entire street blanketed with 3-5 inches of soft white SNOW! Instead we woke up to lots and lots of ICE! No Snow!What is it like where YOU are right now? I would LOVE to hear about your snow stories!! Has it inspired some great snowy themed art projects?? You can read my family blog about our "No Snow Day" here...http://www.natandjimmy.blogspot.com/

Student Spotlight!!

One of my AMAZINGLY gifted 5th grade students created this awesome drawing with oil pastels for the the Annual Visual Arts Contest with the Society of Performing Arts Houston.(you can click to enlarge) The theme this year is “The Fabric of our World; What are We Made of” He decided to add this to a series of paintings and this was part two. I think it is beautiful and filled with symbolism!



You might remember my post last year when he painted the part one in his series entitled “Dreaming Awake”

The Theme was “Visualize Your Dreams, Beyond Your Own Cityscape”








you can put any art in a “virtual museum” with http://www.dumpr.net/