Today was great!

I finished the AOE class on Classroom Management earlier in the week and put all the pieces into place for the beginning of school.  I quickly made some new posters to reflect all I had learned.  I even have a "Woo Hoo" letter, shared with a kids accompanied by a exuberant "woo hoo", to be sent home with outstanding students.  I modeled, they modeled and we all practiced.  I'm feeling really positive for a new school year and a great new direction.

my new set up for students for photograph art for artsonia

expectations and consequences

Job chart

Minion bulletin board that was a huge hit in the hallway.

Two new classroom posters

I attended a county wide professional day earlier in the week.  The focus for this meeting was assessments and many of the attendees shared lesson plans along with the methods they used for assessing the lesson.  We viewed and shared many different approaches for rubrics and also some fabulous samples of student works.  Sessions like this are a great use of professional time, you really feel like you walk away with some wonderful plans and ideas.  But, for the purpose of this post, I need to thank Allie Benson of Muddy Brook Elementary for sharing a few of her classroom posters. I took photos of the images and set to work the next day attempting to create similar ones for my classroom.  I am not ever a 100% copier.  I always manage to add my own twist to the ideas I borrow from others.  Here are two of the posters I have created with Allie's examples as a guide.

This first one is a tutorial for creating Zentangles.  Mine is slightly different than Allie's in layout but I did use the information she provided.  I also added my "No Name, No Fame" statement to the bottom of the poster.  My students are accustomed to my reminding them to write their name on their papers with those words.  I also dug out my Zentangle book, purchased a few summers ago and made photo copies of the designs in the back of the book.  I shrunk them down enough to be able to cut them to a 3 1/4 x 3 1/2 rectangle.  They are to be laminated, a hole punched into the upper left corner of each one and hung on a split ring for a visual to accompany the poster.  I plan to make it available for students to use during Free Art or when they finish a project as a filler.




This second one is my "NO Stick Figures!" Poster.  I loved Allie's term Strong Bodies that she uses with her students to indicate not using stick figures.  Here is my interpretation of her poster with a slightly different layout.  I think this might need a bit of discussion and clarification for students to fully grasp the message.  It should be a reminder to them that they need to use shapes to create strong bodies when they draw people in the classroom.    I'm really happy with how they turned out and eager to gage the responses of my students.

NO Name No Fame

I don't recall where I stumbled on those words a few weeks ago but they really got my attention and I began to test them out with my students.  I'd always get a giggle or two when I wrote it on the board but so far its really cut down on those no-name papers.  In my quest to discover a way to create a poster to leave up in the classroom instead of my writing it on the whiteboard for each class, I stumbled on to a really fun website for making signs or posters.  The web is Red Kid and it contains a variety of applications that would be very helpful to the classroom teacher.  This site lead me to another sign making site called says-it.  So here they are, my new signs for the classroom.  I printed them out on photo paper and will add an adhesive magnet to the back. 

Can't

Found this on pinterest and had to share it.   I always tell my students that "Can't" is a bad word in the Art Room!