Back To The Art Room!

Well, summer is officially over, although it did not feel that way in New Jersey this week as we had such oppressive heat and humidity, the likes of which we had not seen all summer! :(  

So hot you are sweating through your clothing! :(

Thursday the kids came back to school... some smiling, some crying, some looking exhausted because they were not used to getting up and moving early in the morning (like me ).

My 1st and 2nd graders were excited when I told them we were painting on the first day! We quickly got our seats , quickly reviewed the art room rules, reviewed our painting procedures and set to creating!  My 1st grades reviewed the color wheel and got to use watercolors, 2nd grade reviewed the color wheel, how to read it to help them mix colors and they used tempera to mix and paint all the colors of the color wheel.

I was happy to see that our "too clean" table placemats were quickly being used  to wipe off brushes! They look so much better with paint on them!

I ordered brandy new paint brushes for this year! It really was time, the others were very well loved but way past their prime!

I ordered, Royal Langnickel Big Kid's Choice.   The kids loved them! They really like the grip on the handle! They were all commenting how cool it was that they grips on the handles!  We went over how to take good care of our new brushes.  I let them know that I still had the old brushes in case there was anyone who was mistreating our new brushes on purpose, I would give them an old brush to use.  All the kids were very careful to use our new brushes correctly! ( I knew they would)

What a happy feeling to see projects drying on the drying racks on the first day! 

There is a major change to my K-2 classes this year... we have always had 40 minutes for art ( I know some of you are saying to yourself " Wow that's all?")  Well, this year I have been reduced to 30 minutes  K-2 ... yeah, 30 minutes...  it was kind of a shock for the kids when I gave them their 5 minute time-check before clean-up! We discussed the time change at the beginning but  they didn't really get it until they saw how short the time felt!  We will work with it, we will get used to it, but we will never like that the time is so short...  my 3d-5th grades have had 30 minute classes for a very long time.  Anyone else out there working with such a short time? I'd love to know...  

This is after two happy classes got to paint.  We will get used to having to clean up faster...  

I also have personally moved into the 21st century and got an IPhone 5 the other day ( chorus of angels singing in the background)  Yes, I have retired my old, well loved and well used texting phone...( it was a really pretty shade of turquoise blue...) but it was time, and my upgrade was in...

I am getting used to it... it actually is cool that I can take photos with it and load them onto Picasa and onto my blog!  I have even started an Instagram for this blog!  I can't get the link to load onto the blog page( it keeps telling me the link Instagram gave me is wrong :(  I'll work on it...  ) but if you want to follow me on Instagram just go over and search for me under users, my user name for Rainbow Skies and Dragonflies is: 

Mrs.C_art      I only have a couple of pictures but I plan on adding them daily!  

Also, for those of you who know and love Hope from Mrs. Knight's Smartest Artist's she now has a Teacher's Pay Teacher's  store!  Go to this link and it will take you to her store!  I have already purchased all the items she has and they are all going to be great inspirations for some pieces I am creating for this school year! 

Another change ( that I am happy about) is that for our SGO's this school year we do not have to give pre and post tests,  we are instead using several mirrored assessments from our projects to obtain the data we need for tiering our students this Fall and following their growth through out the school year. I will have to do final assessments but it will be through our projects! Yeah! We can do a pre and post assessment if we want but they are discouraging us from doing them and would rather we do several different types of assessment that mirror each other and average them together to get our data. 

Well I'm off to write my lesson plans for the week and do some Eco-Printing today! Oh yeah, and piles and piles of laundry!  :)

Have a great week! 

Mrs."C"  :)

School Shopping!!!

I ordered my new personal planner this morning from Amazon.  I need something that I can carry with me in my school bag so that I can keep track of events at both schools and my personal life. When I saw this one the cover design screamed my style! I also like the set up inside and it's not too big.  It's supposed to be delivered by Thursday so I can start filling it up!

I was doing some school shopping today and I found these great bins at my local Dollar Tree store! I basically cleaned them out of all their red, blue and lime green bins! These are a perfect size to put markers, crayons and oil pastels in on the art tables! They have a hinged top that folds flat against the sides ( this way no lids will get lost...) At the end of the day they will stack very neatly!  Yeah! I'm so happy with them!  :) I just have to make labels for them now...

At Target I was looking for something I could use for my table bins that I have for my 3d-5th grade school. I like the plastic bins I used last year and they are already labeled for the tables but... since they did not have sections the pencils, scissors and glue sticks just rolled around together inside the bins and it made me crazy! I found these metal mesh make-up organizer pieces and knew these would be perfect! I got the long skinny one for pencils and the smaller rectangle one for scissors. They will fit perfectly in the bins and there will still be enough room for the glue sticks. No more digging for pencils! I also picked up some plastic tumblers at the A&P on clearance from their seasonal stuff to put colored pencils in for the tables.  

I need to start planning out lessons for the Fall and pre-assessments for my SGO's for this school year.  I still have 3 weeks before school starts but it will be here before I know it! There is still a lot of summer left and I plan on enjoying every minute of it!  

I'm finishing up a new summer shawl, have a couple more skirts I want to sew up and some Eco-Printing I want to do this coming week. I'll post pics when I get them! :)