Covering for Common Planning Time

 This year's schedule looks a little different in my elementary art room.  Because we lost one class in our schedule; we now cover a class each week on a rotating basic.  This allows the classroom teachers a bit of common planning time.  We were given the freedom to handle this extra class time in any way we felt worked better for our curriculum.  After some thought, I knew I didn't want to just continue with the current lesson as that would put that class ahead of the others.  I stumble across a great idea on Art of Education and immediately implemented it for this one time a week space in my schedule.  Here is the link to the article on Art of Education.  Now students are given the opportunity to explore careers that are supported by the Arts.  My students love the freedom to explore on their own and it's a great way to not disrupt my curriculum and instead to enhance it.

Most classes have only visited one time so far this school year and at 

most I will probably see them only twice.  Each time they come, it is fresh and new as they experience a new station.  I have set up six stations.  I initially was afraid too many students might be drawn to the iPad station or the Architect station but have found they are eager to experience them all.  I am evolving with this as well as I think of new ways to build the stations through supplemental materials.  For instance, I just purchased a Sphero ball to attempt so coding and drawing.  I also have one of those cute little trucks that follows a drawn line.  I should mention that I only use the stations for 1st-5th grades,  for Kinders I pull out some manipulations for a bit of Reggio play.  You can see post about my use in the classroom in previous post on my blog like here and here.

 Take a look at the AOE article and explore how you might implement these stations into your art room as well. 

Chameleons in mixed medium

I'm developing a love for bleeding tissue paper this year.  Seems like each year I get stuck on some medium and explore it unreasonably.  This year it seems to be becoming project with that tissue paper.  Here is the latest, done quite successfully with first grade students.   They drew with a black crayon and then watercolor for the background and the little chameleon was glued on top.  This was a two week lesson.  I was really please with the results.  We also paired this with some factual information about Chameleons found in the book.