'BEYOND THE BORDER' Benefit Art Sale for Families of the Victims of Colorado City/ Hildale Flooding

Please come support our middle schoolers and purchase one of their paintings for a minimum donation of $10 each. Our students have been working hard to get these finished and sold so they can give the money to the mayor who will purchase a memorial bench with the names of the local families lost in the flood in September 2015. 

Fourth Grade Integration of the Water Cycle

Fourth grade illustration of the water cycle.

This past week the fourth grade students were learning about the water cycle. The classroom teachers and I collaborated and this is what came out of our collaboration. Students illustrated and labeled the water cycle in a beautiful way!  

 Kindergarten, first and second grades finished painting their line owls. An emphasis was put on symmetry, line designs, bold color choices and learning to paint with watercolor. 

Kindergarten and first grades are learning about the changing season and practicing stamping leaves and painting in the lines!

Arts Integration and Self Portraits

"How the Arts Unlock the Door to Learning"

Mariko Nobori

http://www.edutopia.org/stw-arts-integration-reform-overview

"Integrating the arts into the curricula helped students embrace their learning and retain their knowledge."

"Arts integration goes beyond including art projects in class; it is a teaching strategy that seamlessly merges arts standards with core curricula to build connections and provide engaging context."

"Arts integration uses teaching practices that have been shown in brain-based research to improve comprehension and long-term retention.  For example, when students create stories, pictures, or other nonverbal expressions of the content they are learning -- a process researchers call elaboration -- they are also helping to better embed the information."

"Beyond engagement and retention...numerous other benefits of arts integration: It encourages healthy risk taking, helps kids recognize new skills in themselves and others, provides a way to differentiate instruction, builds collaboration among both students and teachers, bridges differences, and draws in parents and the community.  Plus it's just plain fun."

"Creating a richer, more memorable learning experience through the arts...unleash not only a rising tide of academic achievement but they lay the foundation for what it means to be a truly creative community."

What I loved most about this article is that it states teachers do not need to be "artistic" to be able to use art integration, rather they just need to learn a few of the fundamentals.  I look forward to the rest of our integrated learning this school year!

In Honor of September 11th

 Students were working on collage so we made these flags over our collages to show our support of September 11th. Charlotte Potter took them around and gave them to the fire fighters, police, ambulance crew, FBI and state's attorney. It was a great way to pause and show our thankfulness to those who keep us safe!

 First grade patriotic owls

Our first week of school in the art room

Here's what we worked on for our first week of school. We looked at the artwork of Kandinsky and made as many lines as we could think of and then we painted them with tempera paint. Beautiful paintings of color and line emerged. 

Color and line composition by a 2nd grade student

We also started working on our self portraits after looking at self portraits by Frida Kahlo and Vincent Van Gogh. This is the beginning of a self portrait by a kindergarten student. Don't you just love the lines of his hair so quickly rendered?

A fourth grade student begins to paint her self portrait and then begins to work on an interesting background. I can't wait to see how these turn out!

New School Year....New School!!

I am very excited to be a new member of the incredible staff at Valley Academy Charter School! Our school is in its fourth year and will offer all of the four art forms this year. We have highly qualified, certified and experienced music, theatre, visual art and dance teachers! The students will have visual art twice a week, which will increase their depth of knowledge and skills. I am very optimistic about how much we will accomplish this school year!!
Here's a picture of the new art room. Take a look and see what we will be doing for our first projects. Please come in and volunteer or participate in our art room whenever you would like! I will be teaching every day, all day so come catch the enthusiasm and learn along with us!

German Holiday Tradition Nutcrackers

This week in art we are learning the history of nutcrackers and how they went from a tool to a work of art that is now part of our holiday traditions.
Students started with a folded in half, black paper and then placed a rectangle template right on top of the fold in the middle and traced around it for the body of their nutcracker. Then we began adding details and talked about how these objects were brought over to the US by soldiers returning home for Christmas after WWII. This became a popular American holiday tradition during the 1950's and has been a part of our festivities ever since!
To finish the project students traced over their pencil drawing lines with black oil pastel and then colored in each section solid.