Friendly Facelift

Our cafeteria got a facelift, just in time for the new year! The bottlecaps were installed the day before school started. It was a great surprise for the students at lunchtime---seeing their artwork up on the wall! The kimbap was created by elementary students. High school students worked on the taco, with a lot of work being finished this summer by the secondary art teacher.

As you can see, there's a few gaps and areas needing touch-up, but I am thrilled with the result! Now to plan the coordinating mural for the right side of the cafeteria. I'm thinking pizza and dragon fruit...


In addition to the bottlecaps, I managed to get some paint up on the walls. While our facilities manager was out of town, I convinced his assistant to paint the columns in cafeteria. I was inspired by a picture of another school cafeteria that I found while looking for design ideas for our new Early Childhood Center.

When the facilities manager returned, he asked me if I painted the columns. I said "Well, I didn't physically do the painting, but I might have suggested the colors." A few days later, I heard him tell the Early Childhood Center Project Manager "If we build it, she will paint it." I had to laugh and smile, both at the concept and at the Field of Dreams reference.

Student Services retooled their Welcome and Goodbye boards from a less-traveled hallway to now go under the bottlecap display.  Overall, the cafeteria looks so friendly and fun!  Much less institutional...and more like a space for students!

I take an added interest in the cafeteria because my classroom is directly behind the bottlecap wall. I love to wander the cafeteria at lunch, sitting with different students, chatting, and eating lunch. This year, I am free during all three lunch periods which allows for extra socializing! And after three years of teaching, the middle school is now full of my former 5th graders. Middle school lunch is such a treat, seeing all the friendly faces of my former students.

The cafeteria is also the location for the art gallery portion of the Elementary Fine Arts Gala. The colored columns will alter the all-white gallery space, but I'm sure the splash of color will work in our favor.

Another new display

It's off to the printer!

The poster depicts class expectations based on the kid-friendly version of our Expected Schoolwide Learning Results (ESLRs). Unfortunately, I won't have my new "rules" ready for the first day of art class, at least for the classes that come on Monday, but I'm excited to see the final result. It will be about 1 meter wide and just a little taller than that. This is the first thing I will have gotten printed for my classroom! Banners, teeshirts, mugs---my designs end up all around my school and on my students, but this is new territory. At less than $10, I might be getting a lot more custom posters for my room.


By the way, purple is underrepresented in my rainbow room, thus the tone-on-tone purple poster.





The background image (ESLR MAN!) is compliment of our curriculum and professional development coordinator. In preparation for our WASC accreditation visit last spring, she analyzed how we utilize (or don't utilize) the ESLRs as a part of daily school life and learning. The ESLR icon was born as a way to visually identify the ESLRs at play in school. We joke about ESLR stamps, temporary tattoos---you name it, we've suggested it.

I took the icon and added stylized labels of our five ESLR categories, and then she and I attacked our campus with the icon last semester. We stuck ESLR MAN! next to bulletin boards, plaques, student work---anything that demonstrated achievement in one of the five categories. The goal was to help student and teachers see how they were already working towards our ESLRs. And now ESLR MAN! has found his way into the background of my classroom EXPECTATIONS...




In case you were worried, I haven't gotten rid of my "Awesome Artists" poster. I moved it to the back wall of my room, above the construction paper. I still plan on referring to it and discussing ways students can be "Awesome," but for this year, the focus is personal; In art class, I will try my best to learn and not give up.

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.

First Grade Self-Portraits

Remember that time I went to Shanghai for a "business trip?" It was such a refreshing weekend! I came back with lots of ideas for projects (like that awesome batik process) and connections to many other art teachers at international schools.

Another project I incorporated right away was a first grade self-portrait seen at Shanghai American School. We learned the word portrait, then began drawing our face step-by-step together. Oval face, eyes in the middle, L nose, flattened M and U for the mouth, strong necks (no lollipops!), and broad shoulders. Don't forget the eyebrows and ears!

When finished with their pencil drawings, they traced their lines in black marker. Next, we read The Colors of Us and tested Crayola Multicultural Crayons to find matching skin tones. Looking at four self-portraits by Albrecht Durer in The Art Book for Children, we noticed backgrounds as a way to tell more about ourselves. The students added drawings of their toys (real or the ones they want) in the background. Some also added bits of a room and family members. Lastly, they worked on nice coloring for their clothing and background.

Some of the pictures below were taken before students finished coloring their self-portraits. I am so pleased with the results!

All Those Extra Things...

I once heard a professor speak about an elementary principal that expected her to create a custom personal Christmas card for him. Apparently the previous art teacher did this favor. She put her foot down and said "that is not my job."

But life over here is different. And (don't hate me) I teach 12 art classes a week. One PreK, one K, and two sections each of 1st-5th grade. Each class comes to art for less than an hour. I am also required to study two hours of Chinese each week, and every other year, I teach AP Art History on top of my elementary load. (Can I call it a load? It's more like a small handful of classes...) And I'm working on my masters through Penn State's online program.

This year, being a non-AP year, I had a lot of extra prep time at school. Don't get me wrong---I love evenings without planning---but I needed a few extra tasks to keep me going throughout the day. Chaperoning field trips, assisting with in-class artsy projects, reading to students during their library time, and that whole accreditation process. (I was a focus group leader for our WASC self-study and assisted with the editing process.)

But one of my favorite things is pretending to be a graphic designer. Busting out my old school Adobe CS from 2005, praying that it will still cooperate with Vista, and creating some digital work! It is awesome to see your work in print. Flyers, posters, banners, t-shirts, medals, engraved plaques, a yearbook cover, a ceramic mug, a travel mug---the list goes on! If you haven't heard, it's pretty cheap to produce things in China, so we get a lot of customized things. And my design work, that comes even cheaper!

I've already posted about my "branding" of the elementary drama, but I thought I'd share with you a few more images of my work. It's nothing fancy, but I thoroughly enjoy the design process. I like to be able to assist and I love seeing the finished products. Just this spring, I've designed 4 different t-shirts! So cool to see someone walking around town wearing one of the shirts I designed...



My passion for all things artsy extends to include helping select paint colors (for the school building and coworkers' apartments), then supervising the mixing process or doing color corrections, and other interior design tasks. I've designed drying racks from scratch (aiya! not fun), custom cabinetry for the ceramics studio, and now I'm working on cabinets for our new Early Childhood Center. I've only finished one traditional piece of "art" while in China (a painting), and one while I was in the states last summer, but I am constantly working as an amateur graphic designer, product designer, interior designer and party planner (decorating for formals!). It's not exactly portfolio-worthy, but it's fun and fills a need in our school community. Just another one of the services provided...