A New School Year...

 

I'm getting ready for a new school year!  I have been working on signs, displays, assessment and paper work all summer and it's time to start putting it into my art rooms! (and get the piles of stuff out of my house!)

I decided to go with colors for my tables this year instead of numbers.  These are the table markers I made.  I found the crayon box line drawing on Pinterest.  You can find the printable on my Stuff For Art Lessons board on my Pinterest Page.  It took forever to color each one but I love how they came out!  My husband scanned them onto the computer in case I need to replace any during the school year.  (Thanks Hon!)  I just need to laminate them and attach them all onto my tables at school.

 

This is one of two job charts I made for my art rooms.  I have clear pockets that attach to each job line when I get them laminated at school.  My husband took the scans of my table color sheets and shrunk them to fit into the pockets.  Each week a different table will have a different responsibility.  I will just move the colored cards from pocket to pocket.  This school has only four tables (K-2).  My other art room has six tables (3-5) so that chart will include "Pass Out Supplies" and "Collect Supplies".  I found this great tie-dye oak tag at Wal-Mart this summer.  It came in two color combinations so I got a couple for each school.  The other one will become my display board for my "Essential Questions" for each lesson.  I still have those charts to put together yet. 

At my 3rd - 5th grade school, I have to give letter grades to my students.  How their art work is graded is confusing to them even with using rubrics (Me too! Personally, I don't feel we should be letter grading a child's artwork but that's a subject for another day!).  So this year I created display boards for each letter grade so they can visualize what each grade looks like!  I saw this idea several places on the web.  I think the visual will also help parents who have questions about grading.

This is what an "A" looks like

This is what a "B" looks like

This is what a "C" looks like

This is what a "D" looks like

These are young kids.  I have never had to give less than a "C-" and that student's effort improved the following marking period.

These are sayings, quotes I found on Pinterest.  You can find them all on my Pinterest Page

on my Wise Words board.  I printed them out and embellished them for dislpay.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love how these came out!  I especially love the potato shaped creature in the above photo!

Remember a couple of posts ago I mentioned that we were doing DIY in the back of our house?  Well...  We finished!  For this year any way.  There is more that we want to do but that won't be until next summer.  We are planning on adding large pieces of field stone to the new patio area and extending the deck out.  What used to be here was a muddy area that never grew grass and was always a mess!  Adding the pea gravel cleaned it up and makes it a very enjoyable place to sit and hang out now!

 

 

These are the great new steps I asked my husband to build.  Didn't he do a great job?!  The other staircase is still on the other side of the deck.  We decided to leave them there as we want to create a lower deck on that side next summer. 

 

See the large sticks in the back?  They are from birch trees that I trimmed out of the tiers up above.  I am going to make them into a coffee table for the patio.

 

This is where I trimmed out all those trees.  This lower level looked like the top there until I cleaned out all the brush.  I found all my Hosta and Birds Nest Spruce existing among the weeds!  Now I can actually see them again! 

 

I whipped up these pillows for the outside chairs from fabric and pieced panels I had in my creative stash.  It only took one evening to put them all together.  I was looking for pillows in the stores and refused to pay $10.00+ a cushion for something that was just two pieces of printed fabric sewn together!  ("Seriously?!")  The pillow with the crocheted mandala will go with me to one of my schools for my desk chair.  Well, that's everything I have to share for today...  Now to try and drag the teenagers out of bed!  :)