For the love of art...

I, like many people, have been reading old posts.

For the record: While I am gratefully overwhelmed by the massive amount of pageviews this past month (something I mainly attribute to art teachers using pinterest to prepare for a school year), I am slightly sad to see the emphasis on posts that are two and three years old! I hope it doesn't break your heart, pinterest art teachers, but I don't even have the art class jobs anymore. Eeek! So while I still stand by my "stool inspector," I'm not using that system anymore. What excites me is my new systems, new displays, and even my consortium's new standards for visual arts!

As I was perusing posts with pictures of my room (and boy was it UGLY my first year--the wall color, the TV shelf, the dangling lights--a fresh paint job, new TV, CORK WALLS, and colorful displays make such a difference!),
I stumbled upon the sweetest story:

Yesterday, I painted with 9 first grade students during the last period of the day. We had about 15 minutes between classes. It was just enough time for me and Mrs. Yang to set up 9 painting stations, fully equipped with water, paper towels, two paintbrushes, a 15x20 sheet of paper, and a palette with red, yellow, blue, and white paint.

Side note: My students were so excited to paint this week that one student brought paintbrushes from home! Waiting to come into the room in the hallway outside the classroom, another student commented "but she only has 7 paintbrushes!" I assured him that I had paintbrushes too, and every student would get a paintbrush, even if she didn't have enough for everyone in class...

Jumping forward to year five, yesterday was the first day of the second art classes of the year. I had one class of first grade, one class of third grade, and one class of fifth grade. The fifth graders--those students were first graders during my first year. First graders who were so excited to paint that they brought their own paint brushes! As for this year's first grade, amazingly it was another class of 9 and I was painting with them. It's really a beautiful thing!

     The magic of mixing paint with six year olds.

And the third graders. They were the first class of the morning. I was lazy this year and didn't communicate to the classroom teachers about art smocks but these third graders brought them anyway. As they lined up at my door, a few students mentioned the new boy's art smock. "Yeah, it's nice!" I told them, glancing quickly at the plastic apron. It had pictures of art supplies in the pockets. Cute. It wasn't for another three or four minutes that I realized what they were talking about. It didn't have pictures of art supplies; he brought his own supplies to class! Pockets full of markers, scissors, and glue. His own artistic toolbelt!

It's been five years.
Some of the excitement is gone.

But for him, our relationship is just beginning.

It was our first real day of art-making, together. He is precious. He enthusiasm is inspiring. He's one of the reasons I love my job.

Thank you!

Beautiful (OOPS) Bulletin Board!

It's a week into school. 9 days to be exact, but today was the start of the 2nd art classes of the year. With each class finished the introduction and oops, I spent the afternoon stapling all 115 projects onto the two bulletin boards.


I know there are differing views on exposed cork, borders, and asymmetrical displays, but I think the chaotic-overlapping-and-hanging-over-the-edge aesthetic works well for this project.

The kids were already peeking on their way to music class, searching for their oops on the board!

Back from the printer

I have an addiction. Or three, maybe four.

     1 kuai colored paper
     double-sided tape
     custom printing (with unique fonts)

When I first got into my classroom in 2008, I started to make posters with class expectations, character traits of the month, flavorful folds, and my name. By the time second semester rolled around, I'd realized my TA had much nicer handwriting. She became my go-to sign maker, creating character trait signs for successive years, job charts, bookshelf labels, and a bilingual color wheel.

Last year, my TA switched departments. With her handwriting out of the picture, I decided to try a new avenue for classroom displays--custom printing. It seemed only natural to enlist the local printer for art classroom needs; my graphic design projects had already made it on t-shirts, banners, posters, and mugs for the school.

Throughout the process, I loved the freedom and possibilities of creating my new class expectations digitally, and the finished product looks amazing in my classroom!


This year, I took on a few new printing projects. I decided the color wheel could use an upgrade. The laminated pieces had a few minor errors and were starting to look a little worse for wear. These posters were printed as rectangles, then I cut the edges to look like paint blobs.

I was also inspired by posters on pinterest. I loved content, but like timelines, I just wasn't quite satisfied with the designs as is. I'm quite picky. I needed them to fit in specific spots around my whiteboard and I preferred a different color scheme. Combine some new fonts (Equestria and GeoSansLight), my rainbow class colors, and a taupe-y/grey background. Ta da! New posters for my art room.

Look really carefully, to the left of the bulletin board. You can see the very narrow space that necessitated custom posters. While I was at it, I printed an extra noise level chart for the secondary art teacher and about 14 extra THINK posters for teachers at school.

I absolutely love the way the posters turned out! Thanks to pinterest for linking me up with the originals and to Theresa Gillespie and Shannon P Long for sharing their ideas.

Beginning with a Beautiful OOPS!

Towards the end of my first year, I started building a class library of art books. Stories about art, famous artwork, and artist biographies. More about my favorite books later. My family came to visit that summer and brought a treasure---$100 of children's books I had ordered with the next year's budget.

Year two began with a different book for each grade level (Ish, The Dot, and others). At that time, I thought I would continue with those books every year, one permanently assigned to each grade level. I can't remember if I kept the tradition in year three, but year four brought a different idea. I kicked off the year with one book for the entire elementary school. Art is...

This year, year five, I picked a different book. Beautiful Oops. It's part of my new stash. Broke the bank (or should I say, the budget) and brought back nearly $170 of books from my time in the states this summer. Well this book is unlike any I've seen before. If you haven't purchased it yet, rush out to your nearest bookstore and get it! I'd say order it online but amazon is temporarily out of stock. To call it a pop-up book is a gross understatement. Ripped pages, bent corners, flaps and overlays and crumpled up paper. Each "oops" is creatively transformed into something beautiful. Seemed perfect for art class!

While I want my students to practice good craftsmanship, sometimes you just have to make it work! Your neighbor drips paint on your picture--make it work. Don't like the line you drew in pen--make it work. A smudge and a smear--make it work.

Transform oops moments into a wonderful part of your finished work.

To practice, I asked students to pick an "oops" page from the board. (I clipped up scraps of paper with tears, folds, wrinkles, smears, smudges, and drips---most gathered from scrap piles in the teachers' workroom, a few with additional and intentional markings from my hand.) Students then used markers, colored pencils, scissors, and glue to modify and create masterpieces. Some of the students finished early and wanted to do a second piece. Others added lots of details. One particular first grade boy thought the challenge was too easy. After he beautified the smudge on his paper, he took some markers in hand and made some wild dashes along the bottom, chanting something about more mistakes and more oops. He then managed to incorporate those scribblings purposefully into his scene.

All the "oops" art will take over the bulletin boards outside my classroom next week. They are really quite special! I am more than pleased with the results. Some of the students were so engaged they wanted to continue working on their oops project next week!

(The picture above is also a small preview of some new displays in my room. Check back for more info about my word wall, noise chart, color wheel, and other additions in year five!)

Art is...

Ever get a GREAT idea, only to find out you're not the first one to think of it?

I recently taught about Western art education to a group of local Chinese teachers. A post for another time. I stressed the importance of problem-solving, critical thinking, and originality in art, not copying the teacher. There's much more to be said about this training, but I told the teachers about a Saturday morning cartoon that I will never forget. It was a little blurb from Aladdin's Genie challenging the idea that great minds think alike. Instead, he would change the phrase to great minds think for themselves.

So while I don't think my ideas are that unique, amazing, or original, I still pride myself in thinking for myself. Something about American values of individualism and charting your own path that has been engrained into my person from my upbringing, including Saturday morning cartoons. Sure, I'm inspired by everything in life, but I'm less likely to copy a lesson, bulletin board, or activity exactly. And a lot of my ideas, they come from my own mind, combining various things I've seen online, in books, at another school, or completely unrelated to art education. Yet over and over I see that there is nothing new under the sun.

In my first year of teaching, my friend Miss Emily told me about her third grade painting lesson, based on the artwork of Wayne Thiebaud. I'm not sure where she got her idea, but between my first and second weeks of teaching the project, I found an almost identical lesson in a six year old copy of School Arts magazine!

Now this year, I was so excited by an idea that came to me in the middle of my first art class. Less than 24 hours later, saw it on a list of 20 Creative Bulletin Board Ideas for Art Teachers. So I guess it's not original, but it was a great first day of art class activity.


For all my classes, except for that first group of 5th graders, I welcomed them to the art room, then passed out a piece of paper, cut hotdog-style, that had "Art is" printed on it. The students could finish the sentence any way, with as many or few words as they needed, and decorating however they saw fit with crayons, markers, and colored pencils. After they worked for a while, I let students share their sentences, followed by reading the book Art Is... by Bob Raczka. (I turned the book into a Prezi to make it easier for the students to see the pictures.) We then went over art class expectations and created namecards for my job pockets.

To display the work, I created a custom-border with the lines from the book.








I love their answers.  One boy wanted a second piece of paper and attached his two answers. 
"Art is droling (drawing). 
Art is lerneing (learning)."

Of course, art is fun, fun, fun, fun, and funny.

But did you also know it's boenqshrs?

It is also: amazing, magical, a great subject, my favorite subject, good, bad, cool, nothing, fear, difficult to me, even fun, color, drawing magic, beautiful, creative, fantastic, unusual, great, pretty, perfect, m&m...

Finally, as the book says,
"Art is how artists get you to think."



So the moral of the story: Think for yourself, realizing that someone else probably already thought of it. But it's about the process, not the product, so still do the thinking.




boenqshrs is 1st grade spelling and mirroring of letters for doing (boen) pictures (qshrs).

New Year, New Displays

My room has evolved just like my teaching. The first year was all over the place, making lots of mid-year changes and figuring it out as I went along. The second year was a huge change, being able to plan well from the beginning and knowing much more what I wanted. The third year was almost a complete repeat of year two, with only subtle tweaks (character traits in rainbow colors, redoing teacher pockets for new teachers, etc.).


One new addition for year three was the "artmaking process." When reading an info sheet about the Davis Elementary Textbook Explorations in Art, I was curious by the "five-step studio process, aligned with the five-step writing process." I asked around with the elementary teachers and it turns out, they all teach slightly different versions of the writing process.

     Is making a 2nd draft a step?
     Are revising and editing different steps?
     How about publishing?

After thinking about it for some time, I decided to simplify and create a four-step process. I didn't get the posters up until December, but they found a perfect home just above my white board (funny thing...maybe I custom fit them to the space...).


I thought long and hard about the subject matter of my example art piece. While I first thought an apple would suffice, I decided to chose something from the city culture here in China. The "May Wind" is a large sculpture in a park along the waterfront near the "city hall." It is easily recognized by the students and taps into local pride and identity.



This year, I'm itching for some new displays. My line families (straight, angled, and curvy), created on newsprint, served me well for three years, but could hold up no longer. I'm also considering revamping the art "rules" (Awesome Artists) to align to our Expected Schoolwide Learning Results (ESLRs). Finally, I would like to emphasizes vocabulary and feature artists somewhere in the room. And school starts on Wednesday. BUT elementary specials start the following Monday, so I have until the 16th to finalize my "first day" displays, with room to grow and change as the year progresses. In the meantime, I'm scouring the art blogs for inspiration.