Moving Along and a Creative Challenge...

Hi Everybody!  Hope you all had a creative and productive week! Art classes are up and running and it feels like we never left!

2nd grade is finishing up their Fall Warm/Cool Shape Flowers and have done their first self-reflection. They did a really good job with it! They answered some quick questions, What are the Warm colors? What are the Cool Colors? 2 things about your painting you are proud of and 1 thing about your painting you would change.

When their reflection was finished they moved on to creating a building or castle using only the four shapes, square, rectangle, triangle and semi-circle. Our next project is going to be a Klee inspired shape building in an oil pastel watercolor resist.  I've done a similar lesson several times with different grade levels and the pieces always come out beautiful! Working on how to creatively change it up from past lessons... this will finish up our shape review and we will move to our...

...tissue paper stained Jack-O-Lanterns! Second grade is eagerly waiting to create these! They remember seeing last year's and keep asking when we are going to make them! Hard to believe that when both these projects are complete we will be in November!

If you are a follower of Nic Hahn aka Mini Matisse,  she is going to be running a great creative challenge during the month of October! It's going to ton's of fun! I did several creative challenges on Twitter this summer with the #k12artchallenge  gang and it was awesome! Check this out if you are looking for a little creative spark in your world! It's open to anyone and everyone! There's no obligation to do a certain amount of participation, do what you can when you can, just jump in and give it a try!

I gathered up some old, (and I mean old, I found these old placemats when I cleaned out my paper shelf this summer, I save everything that I think may have a creative purpose one day people, simply I'm a packrat! ) scrap paper from watercolor placemats at school to glue onto some heavier paper for creating some ATC's for the #k12artchallenge ATC's . 

I spent a little time glueing them down and measuring out some cards. This is also great practice for me as I am going to have my 4th grades participate in the student ATC swap this November that Nic is hosting! My students are super excited about it! 

( floating spheres project idea from Fine Lines, Fancy Pants from Shine Brite Zamorano )

This week marked the end of my last chalk board... I loved my chalk board... all the chalk boards in the building were re-surfaced with a white board laminate this past week. Tuesday I was drawing on a chalk board, Wednesday it was white board... even the beautiful, original slate boards in the original part of the building(our school was built in the 1930's) were covered and modernized... do you sense my sadness? If you have never draw/written on a slate board... let me just say they were my favorite! I guess times are a changin'... I have a white board in my other art room and I have never been a white board fan but I will make the best of it... got any ideas for the chalk and masking tape I can no longer use on my white board?  I'm now using low tac painter's tape to hang my examples and papers that I demonstrate on... no harm to the white board surface and it holds my papers well! I also covered the magnets on my "clippy men" so they don't scratch the surface and I can still use them, I can't be with out my "clippy men" magnets! 

... considering that I have neglected my domestic duties since school has started and I have been lesson planning, SGO writing and assessing and in general collapsing after work I need to get off this computer and clean today, desperately, before we become an episode of Hoarders... 

Hope you all enjoy your first weekend of Fall! 

Have a creative and happy week all!

Mrs."C"  :)