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This is an old lesson repurposed. I used to do the traditional paper bag and headdress lessons with Kindergarten and 1st grade, but they now do it in their classroom.  I still have all of these handouts.  Most came from the Art Teacher's Book of Lists .  My learning to read and ELL student's love these.  I decided we could still use them but on a  Canoe Sculpture.  Using the Reading Rainbow streaming video of  The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush as my lesson introduction  the student's expressed a story with pictures on their paper canoe. I pre traced a canoe on a 12 x 18 folded sheet of brown paper. The more faded the better. to add a little texture and fun we rubbed on color using the texture sheets and peeled construction paper crayons. What fun! The students then wrote their stories with black crayon and colored them in with the construction paper crayons. I went around gluing the curv...

The Art department and the Music Department collaborated with each other to display patriotic student flag collages during the Veteran's day program this year. Here are the steps I took with the third graders to create their beautiful flags. Patriotic Collage[/caption]

Because I love teaching art and it's Halloween....I made crayon pumpkins!

This past weekend, Our school district had a small fall break. My mother and Miss Carter joined me for a fun day today at the Dallas Arboretum!

[caption id="attachment_570" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Red Leaf Yellow Leaf[/caption] Thank goodness we had an early release day today. I was finally able to display some of the beautiful leaf prints the first graders produced. I found this wonderful lesson over at the amazing Deep Space Sparkle site. I really followed Patty's steps, but did make a few changes. I  use artifical leaves and changed some of my paper color from black to copper. The results are Beautiful!  

Ahh .....I'm an hour away from arriving at my vacation destination with my wonderful husband. This is our first empty nest vacation! I am very excited to just do what we please for a week in Maui! Luckily, Miss Carter is manning the house and the animals! Enjoy a few of my vacation photos!

I always get a little weary the last week with my fifth graders. I asked some of my awesome artists what did they wanted to do in their last art class of elementary school. They said, "PAINT!" So I looked around the blogs for a one day painting lesson and found many sites that had students using line, shape, overlapping patterns to create an interesting composition with watermelon slices. We used china markers, and tempera cake paints on 80 lb sulfite construction paper . No pencil drawing, just drawing with the china markers. I told them to pick to complementary colors to paint with. They could add a background color if time allowed. Everyone was happy on the last week of school, which is a good thing!

I finished up 16 days of summer school art today. We painted red, white and blue papers yesterday. Today we put them back together to make our own version of the Grand Old Flag! Thank you Painted Paper

What a rush, getting ready for Open House this week and having our Art Fair. It is so much fun to see the art work come together and having such amazing students and parents supporting Youth Art Month!

After a record HOT HOT HOT year in North Texas, our winter has been mild. I have only done one winter lesson. As a native Hoosier, I miss the winter tree lessons I grew up with. Here is my version thanks to Snowflake Bentley. !

We made masks and added a tail of stamped patterns and tissue tales to make our own Chinese Kites!