How could something so small make such a big difference in the art room?
Foray manual pencil sharpener works great on large and small pencils and colored pencils.
I purchased seven of these Foray double-hole sharpeners, one for each of my tables. I used my electric sharpener to sharpen all the new pencils at the beginning of the school year. Guess how many times I have used my electric since? ZERO.
Foray double-hole manual sharpener.
All the kids ages 6 and older use the manual sharpeners! They put a nice sharp tip on our large pencils. They save my time, the students have more independence and the room is a little quieter.
AND they work well on colored pencils,much better than my electric pencil sharpeners.
I just learned about a fabulous free resource – the Digital Comic Museum. You can download complete vintage comic books for free! Most are from the comic book Golden Age (1930s-40s) and all are in the public domain and copyright free. Majority are US comics with a handful of Canadian and Australian/New Zealand titles.
This is a fabulous resource for SO MANY LESSON PLANS in art, art history, design, illustration, graphic arts, U.S. history, propaganda and communications at every level from upper elementary through college.
(Note: if you read Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & ClayYOU MUST CHECK OUT THIS SITE! It is a like a visual companion to the novel).
I read about the DCM on Free Technology for Teachers. If you are a blogger or a teacher, please check out their site for lots of great resources.
Our fifth graders are starting their mask unit, just in time for Halloween. We kicked off the project with ‘Mask Day’: the kids tried on my entire international mask collection, plus an assortment of student-made masks.
I placed masks on all the tables and the kids rotated through. To keep the students even more engaged, I asked them to guess which materials were used to make the various masks. It turns out the hardest to identify were 1) the bark cloth on the Peruvian jaguar mask and 2) the coconuts on the round Indonesian masks.
We are now building our own plaster masks. You can see last year’s mask-making process and final results in this post, this post and this post. Kids look forward to this project for years – it is messy but so totally worth it. Stay tuned for updates!
What makes a good conference? Great workshops and networking, of course. Hold it in a drop dead AMAZING setting like San Diego’s New Children’s Museum (NCM) and you have a home run hit! San Diego Art Education Association held its first annual Visual Arts Educators Conference this month at the museum. After introductions by energetic new SDAEA president Ron Jessee and a keynote address, Tomoko Kuta, NCM’s Director of Education & Exhibitions, took us on a tour.
The New Children’s Museum is one of the only children’s museum in the United States dedicated to commissioning artists to create site-specific works for a youth audience.
Staff held a kiddie yoga class under this Layer sculpture the day we visited.
Jason Rogene’s sculpture/light fixture made of styrofoam packaging.
Jason Rogenes’ Megalitransponderincludes kiddie climbing wall topped with cardboard installation.
I got to attend three workshops, all tied in to NCM’s current exhibition, TRASH. They were held in the museum’s art education studios.
’30-minute’ collograph printmaking with the museum’s art educator, Maxi Moraga
sculpture/drawing project based on the art of Peter Opheim by fellow San Diego elementary art teacher and blogger Don Masse of Zamorano Arts Academy
Sculpt/draw with Don Masse. I really admired this project when I first read it on his blog. So thrilled to try it out myself!!
Starting point for the house of cards sculpture. We collaged/painted our pieces, then assembled. This would be a great whole class or whole grade project.
As if all this wasn’t enough, we had a fabulous lunch from Urbane Cafe, gift bags with goodies from Blick and Artists and Craftsmen and a raffle with prizes donated by Blick, A&C and area education and arts organizations. I won tickets to the City Ballet! Thanks also to local arts advocacy group art pulse.
A lot of foks in SDAEA, SD County Office of Education and NCM put together this amazing event. Thanks so much for a perfect day.
I love the look of chalk pastels on black paper. Here are our chalk pastel planets from this post on Art Projects for Kids. Gorgeous colors, but so messy. I sprayed them with hair spray.
Chalk pastel planets before fixative
Chalk pastel planets after fixative spray
Yep! They are significantly dulled down. Hair spray is cheap, fixes the pastel and doesn’t smell like a toxic chemical. But…I wish I could maintain those bright colors. I know some teachers skip the spray and store the art between sheets of paper. Any suggestions?
Do you spray your students’ pastel artworks?
Can you recommend a good fixative for chalk pastel?
