Origami and Street Art

Yesterday my after school program students designed a wall piece in the main hallway of our school made of origami cranes and butterflies. For the past 3 weeks, 4th graders have been learning origami. They have had the choice to take their origami creations home, or donate them for this project based off of the artwork of Mademoiselle Maurice. Check out her website, http://www.mademoisellemaurice.com/ She has some great work, and the students loved how origami can be used for street art. Below is one of her works.

My 4th graders have loved doing origami. Origami has seemed to tame even the wildest of post-spring break classes. It does take them about a class and a half (50 minute classes) to learn a crane or a butterfly. 

Currently we are learning how to make origami dragons, thanks to a great video from Art for Kids Hub. http://www.artforkidshub.com/category/origami/ We used their video for learning how to make a butterfly too. Their origami videos are great for my fourth graders. The instructions are clear, entertaining, and they go at a pace that my students can keep up with. Seriously the best origami instructions I have found for students. The students respond way better to following a video tutorial than paper instructions or even me showing them on the overhead. I do still pause at key steps, make sure everyone is understanding, and sometimes show how I make the same folds.

The fact that almost every student wanted to take their origami projects home, rather than donate them is a testament to their excitement about origami. I have had a large percentage of students that have gone home as well and looked up other origami tutorials and brought me presents of other origami creations. I had visions of our hallway design being much, much bigger, but a small amount of donated works kept that from happening. I am just glad that this close to the end of the school year, they are stoked about an art assignment. Here are some more pictures of  our hallway design.

Paint Party 2016 Volume 2

I have been wrapping up our second run of paint parties as a class reward for good behavior. For 3 years, I have felt like dealing with behavior has been a major time killer for my art class. Paint party rewards seem to be helping a ton. Class behaviors have improved dramatically. Kids want to paint. 

In case you missed my last post about paint parties, here is the run down. We have a rotating Friday at my school; which means Monday classes see me one Friday a month, Tuesdays one Friday a month, and so forth. That means each class sees me one extra time once a month. I use this to my advantage. During the four visits prior to a Friday visit to art, classes earn points (5 possible per day). If they get 15 out of 20 points by their Friday in art, they get a paint party.

Essentially, a paint party is just a paint day, but those don't happen often at my school due to large numbers in the classroom and no running water/sink. Painting all day on one day of the week allows me to set up once and take down once. It makes it easy on me, and keeps it energetic and fast paced for the students.

This go around our theme was outside places. I showed the students a photograph that illustrates atmospheric perspective well. We talk about overlapping, how things look smaller farther away, how the color gets lighter for things farther away. We have had some great discussions after asking the question "Why does the color get lighter in the background?" My older grades which have studied the water cycle usually come to the conclusion that evaporation has something to do with it.

Each table received black, white, and one secondary color of paint. During demonstration, students learned about the tints and shades of values. We started with the sky, and worked our way forward with overlapping since we only have the paper on our tables to clean our brushes with. 

Students were allowed to create a painting of any kind of environment they wanted as long as it was outdoors. We even had the opportunity to talk about monochromatic color schemes.

Though this student did not use their color, I love the expressive quality of this painting. Awesome overlapping and rhythm.

This was one of the most rewarding one day assignments I have had in my classroom. What successful rewards do you have for class wide behavior? Please share.

Ojo De Dios

Just a quick post here to show what we have been doing recently. My 4th graders have started a weaving unit. As our intro project, we created Ojo de Dios. I remember doing these when I was in the third grade, back in the 80's, and going back many times after that and making them again on my own. So, I figured if I got something out of it as a kid, surely one or two of my students would get interested. Guess what? I was right.

Since teaching the 4th graders how to create these, I have been ones made at home brought back to me as gifts. I have also had many students go home and make much larger ones and bring them back to show me. That brings me joy. I even had one student who is often extremely checked out, or asleep, or just a behavior/attitude nightmare, wake up and get super excited about these.

Here are some more pictures.

There were many great Ojo de Dios made, but for some reason I did not take many pictures during this project. Probably too busy helping. One thing that was awesome, was that students that really caught on and finished early set out helping the struggling students, and did a better job teaching this than I did. I will be starting this with my third graders soon. This is a quick assignment that I would definitely recommend.

Paint Party Reward

I love reading blog posts from other teachers that give me tips or ideas that I can incorporate into my classroom procedures, or give ways to make things easier for me. I hope that this post is that kind of post for someone out there.

A little background:

My classroom is in half of a portable, with no sink (or should I say, I have one of those portable sinks with the hand pump and a jug under the counter. Aka no plumbing), and large class sizes. With the exception of one grade level I always have a class and a half, on average 36 students, sometimes a bit more, sometimes a little bit less but never much less. So, painting projects have always seemed like a challenge for me in my classroom. Overcrowding often leads to spills. Cleaning brushes and paint containers always seems to take more time than I have. Lucky for me, I was a house painter for over 10 years and feel that if I could clean brushes then, that I can do it now. However, the challenges of my room had led me to only using watercolors because they are easier to clean up, and only letting each grade level have one painting assignment per school year. Which means constantly hearing " Mr. Fleming, are we ever going to paint?"

Down to the helpful information:

Back in December, I stayed late in my classroom and was being a good little art nerd and listening to AOE Live while cleaning my room for the holiday break. While listening to Episode 18 with the lady from the blog Painted Paper, I heard something that got my wheels turning. She mentioned not having water at the tables for students to clean their brushes, but having them clean their brushes out on paper before dipping in a new color. That seemed to answer all my problems. Laura Lohmann, if you read my blog by any chance, thank you. Not having water at the table means no spills. In an overcrowded room, I hadn't found any way to prevent spills, not even the large roasting pan under the wash cup worked, they just tipped that over too. For a long time now, I have been contemplating ways to bring more painting back into my classroom. The one trick of cleaning on the paper was the piece of the puzzle that I was missing.

If you look in the above picture, you will notice that I rolled paper out across my table that is actually a little less in width than the table itself. I told my students that the exposed table area there is a no paint zone. This prevents them from leaning into paint. The other tip with that is this, no students are allowed to tie their aprons. They all whine about this till I demonstrate why. Letting them hang low, prevents the students from leaning against the table and getting paint on their pants. Additionally, I do not have to help anyone untie a knot at the end of class. I tell them if they tie their apron, they can not paint until the knot is out. Students were told as they entered the classroom, that on paint party day, nobody sits down. You can't sit and partaayyy. This is actually a clever way to keep sleeves out of the paint.

Another trick I pulled out was only having primary colors. I told my students this Friday that they could paint anything they wanted, as long as it was appropriate for school, and as long as they mixed color. "Experiment, see how many different colors you can mix." I do plan on having a color mixing game for Paint Party 2. For mixing colors, I showed the students to mix their colors on their artwork. This cuts down on how much paint is used. I also showed them to get all of the paint out of their brush that they can before dipping into another color. This actually works well, if they do not load their brush too much, that is something I need to work on for next week.

Speaking of frequency of paint parties. I am using paint parties as a reward. At my school, I see all classes during the first four days of the week, Fridays are a rotating schedule. One Friday I will see all of my Monday classes, the next I will see all of my Tuesday classes, and so forth. I have been doing a behavior contest at my school for 2015-16. Classes can earn up to 5 points per visit to art. 1 point for how they enter the classroom, 2 points for not interrupting instruction, 1 point for using table voices during work time (not screaming at the person next to you), and 1 point for clean up time. The class with the most points at the end of a grading cycle gets a trophy for their classroom, that can be taken at the end of the next grading cycle if someone gets more points than them. (I got the trophy idea from an article by Michael Linsin, author of Classroom Management for Art, Music, and PE Teachers) As long as the home room teachers are behind it, this has worked very well. However, I wanted to sweeten the  deal for the last semester of the year. If classes earn enough points before they come to me for their rotating Friday, then they earn a paint party.

Friday paint parties allow me to set up paint supplies in the morning and not worry about clean up until the end of the day. They give the students something to work for that they really want, and give me something to remind them about when their behavior is starting to step away from ideal.

As for clean up, sandwich bags inside of my paint cups is the best trick of all. I saw this on one of those classroom hack lists. Without water, cleaning paint containers takes for ever. Another plus to this is, at the end of the day, I just squeeze the air out of the bag and seal it. No paint gets washed down a drain.

As a house painter, I learned that one of the easiest and cleanest ways to clean brushes is in a bucket. Students simply drop their brushes in my water bucket. Once they are all collected, I swish them around, drop them in a second bucket with clean water, swish them around again with the bristles touching the bottom of the bucket, shake the water out of them, and let them dry. I use the buckets that Model Magic comes in. Oh, and don't worry, all of that paper on the table does not go to waste. It is cut down after class, to be used either as scrap paper, or as collage paper.

I can not wait till next Friday for the next paint party. I had all of the kids cheering this past Friday, and way pumped to earn another paint party. We will see how good this works for behavior this week as they try again to earn a party.

I almost forgot, some classes did not earn a party. They had to walk through class looking at the paint party materials to get their alternate assignment. My last class of the day got to watch as I cleaned up from everyone else as they worked on their alternate, silent, writing assignment. Does this make me mean. Maybe, but I hope for the classes that did not have good enough behavior before, that they will want to try a little harder now.

The End Of My First Semester Blogging

Warning! This post is going to have quite a few pictures. 

Friday was the last day of the first semester. I have had a long list of lessons that I have wanted to catch up on posting, but after a weekend of thinking it over, I don't want to spend my whole break blogging. Instead I want to spend it with my kids. So, here is one post to tie up all loose ends. Of course I have a goal for the new year of not getting so far behind on stuff I want to post. Until then, here goes a whole bunch of stuff that I did not get around to posting.

At the beginning of the school year, 5th graders had the choice between two contests to create an artwork for and to enter. This is the piece that we sent off to  a bicycle contest.

 The other contest that 5th graders could choose from was the Fort Worth Stock Show art contest. These horse and farm works are a few of the ones we submitted.

Third graders created Mine Craft inspired self portraits. I got this idea from a post on the blog Shine Bright Zamorano. Here is the link, http://www.shinebritezamorano.com/search/label/minecraft

My third graders loved this. It was a lot of fun. However, I never thought I would spend so much time prepping materials for anything as I did cutting paper squares for this.

Notice the shoes in the picture. My students find it hilarious that I stand on the table to take pictures.

We have a special ed class at our school that meets with the third graders. They excelled at this project and loved it so much that they went back to their classroom and did their own version so that they could keep working on it.

Here is a Kandinsky assignment that kindergarten did as an intro to oil pastels.

They look pretty good hung together in the hallway.

Here are second grades paper weavings from this year. We usually have more time to work on these than we did this year, so they are lacking the pattern that I usually have the students add to their strips before weaving. 2nd grade paper weaving in my room is inspired by Kente clothe. We read The Spider Weaver at the start of the lesson. I had to cut the lesson short after many lost days at our school due to construction.

My fourth graders had a choice of four different ways to show value after creating value scales with pencil, oil pastels, and watercolor. These are from a class that lost the privilege to use oil pastels and water colors, but these three examples were some gems from that group. I hate taking materials away from students, but we have one group at our school that has been quite the challenge this year, and sometimes you have to protect the materials when students are damaging them so that other classes still have them to use.

This is another assignment that I got from Shine Bright Zamarano. It was a very quick assignment allowing students to work together a bit to create a very large work. I will have the whole thing assembled after break and post a picture of it then.

These are a couple of examples from a warm and cool colors assignment that Kindergarten did. We started by creating images with cool colors of things we like to pretend when playing outside. Later we created warm colored windows on top of our drawings with construction paper. This gave some more time for Kindergartners to improve their scissor and glue skills.

My last catch up assignment to post is from the last week of school. Some classes were moved around, and some students were held in their rooms by their home room teachers, so we talked about team work and students created large drawings as a team to portray a subject of their choice. Tips were given about sharing ideas and picking a bottom for their artwork. Also, after the first group, I realized the need to talk about ways to work to make the piece look like one, and not several different artworks on one large paper. These drawings were started by 1st graders, and worked on throughout the day by all other grade levels.

Overall, blogging this year has been an awesome way to reflect on teaching and the goings on of my classroom. Plus, it is nice to have a place to go back and look over what has happened. I haven't quite reached 1000 page views yet, but expect to before semester 2 starts. Thanks to all who have been following this blog and hey, Merry Christmas.