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4th grade Alamo's  On Friday, I finished and delivered our  Square 1 Art  fundraising projects to our wonderful PTA.    I haven't done this project in a while, and forgot how hard it is to get a finished piece of quality work the first three weeks of school, but we did it. My PTA provided my materials colorful materials.  I loved the  Crayola  Extreme markers and crayons and twistables.  We also used Crayola construction paper crayons and oil pastels.    1st grade sunflowers Wayne Thiebaud inspired sweet treats in 2nd grade  Patterned landscapes in 3rd grade  Op Art 5th grade lesson. Thank you for the lesson  we heart art! Kinder was my biggest challenge, so we did a  Tiny Seed Flower. Now we are off and running! Have a good week! 

 My favorite art feature at my school is that we have painted frames. They were painted by a muralist 8 years ago. We lost 4 this year to our new security construction, but I still have many to fill with art. Today, I finally had some art to put up. My students have been working on Square One Art ,and haven't had artwork to hang. Today while the last few finished they did Dot Paintings to coincide with International Dot Week.  I have never hung all the same themed art work before, but it is stunning!  I pre-mixed the colors and had the students paint on 12 x 18 inch paper. Patty over at Deep Space Sparkle has a lesson very similar. They walked around the tables with one cup of paint and a brush. They switched colors after they made one round with their color.  This was a great way to let some student's finish their Square One art while the others created display work. One last bulletin board idea that I recently did came from   Jen at  Dr

I have been a guest Pinner on the organized-teacher-tips-tricks  Pinterest Board this past summer.  The Container Store sent me a generous $100 gift card as a thank you. After signing up to get their notifications  here  for teacher rewards and printed a 10 percent coupon.  Armed with my wish list of containers for markers, books and something for my cubbies,  I went shopping. This was my picture of my cabinets that had markers falling out before.   And after These baskets now have little handles  that allow you to stack all those markers! I loved the little clear boxes that fit into the cubbies.  My oil pastels are in bins now too! I reorganized my free time art area with clear file boxes from The Container Store.  I really feel like I am off to a good start. Thank you Container Store for helping  me to start to organize my art room. 

Well, I took another leap, or tweet today with technology in my classroom.  I created a twitter page for my art classroom.  Skaggs Artroom  is up tweeting.  I read a recent a post on The Art of Education 's blog by Alecia Eggers about a twitter page for your classroom. Since one of my personal professional goals this year was to communicate more with parents and our wonderful PTA I thought this would fit the bill.  After seeking administrative approval I thought about how this would look in my classroom.  The biggest challenge was the lack of a device that did not involve using my personal iphone.  Yesterday, a lightbulb went off when I found an old Iphone in a drawer at home. It still worked, would connect to the wifi at my school, and would not be blocked on our network.  I put the plan in motion and let my 5th graders help me kick it off this morning.  We talked about what it should look like and how we should safely share photos, no faces or names.  I l

Well I did actually have to run down the hall after a Kinder student decided to bolt. My heart rate was up for a while! I have my kinder student's draw us on the first week of school. They take it home on a sheet of paper that has my email and phone number at the bottom  along with the day they will have art. Happy second week of school! It is a short one!     I actually got one Bulletin board up yesterday with our District theme connected to Art!