A Name Art Project- A Wonderful Way to Start Your Visual Art Class

In anticipation of the coming school year I am hoping that I get to teach my own visual art. It is an area of the curriculum that I love and really enjoy teaching. 

In the Ontario curriculum for art we concentrate on the elements of design: line, colour, value, texture, shape and form, and space. I found a great resource for explaining the elements on this site. You should definitely check it out if you are teaching art this year.

This is a great project that could be used as a display for an Open House night and even double as the cover of our art portfolios.

Deep Space Sparkle had just the art activity I was looking for, Name Designs: Line Art...go take a look at this fantastic project to do with your class.

What an amazing site...so many ideas, techniques, supply lists. 

Everything you could ever need to teach art!

The last time I taught this lesson I started with a discussion on lines and patterns. 

My class and I looked at some art by Keith Haring, Van Gogh and others (multiple mediums) and discussed the moods, emotions and types of lines we saw. 

It was very interesting to talk to the kids about their impressions of the famous art works. 

Then we did a lesson on how to draw block letters and we practiced various size letters, shapes of letters and talked about the contours of the lines. Once we had spent a good deal of time on the block letters we moved on to different types of patterns we could create using lines... thick lines, wavy lines, round lines, thin lines...you name it. 

The students created a tic-tac-toe board on their practice paper and drew 9 or so different types of patterns. 

When we had finished that we did a gallery walk to get new ideas from what our classmates had tried. 

(This was my first art class gallery walk and I LOVED it!)

Now we were finally ready to start the project! I must say that the kids were focused, quiet and hard at work make their name projects.  

As a side note: my teaching partner thought this project would be way too hard for grade 4 but I disagreed and felt that if we teach high they will learn high...and I was right! 

 Here are some pictures of my students working away on a rainy Friday afternoon. Some are close to done, some are done and moved on to other line drawings but many are still in the process. 

I can't wait to see what they all look like when they are done and on display!

This student's name only has three different letters and they are all very angular, no curves. 

He has added a TONNE of patterns and I can't wait to see the finished product.

This is one of the finished ones! 

This student chose to use pencil crayons instead of markers for his letters. 

It's going to take more work to colour everything in so that it pops! but he is pretty determined.

This student used a ruler A LOT. 

It will be an interesting contrast to this students who worked free hand.

Click here to see the finished projects on display. 

(Grade 4 students)

Click here to see some more examples taken from a different year. 

(Grade 3 students)

This post was originally published in 2011. 

First week done! Pictures and more pictures.

We returned to school year in Ontario on Tuesday and had a nice 4 day week to ease us back into the routines to school. This year is a little very odd for me because I am only returning for the first 2 weeks of the year!

I decided to focus on curriculum rather than routines because I have no idea how the teacher coming in will want the class to be set up...at least curriculum is constant and by completing some expectations they will be able to focus on the typical beginning of the year community building. 

Here is the makeshift calendar that I created (only using chalk...blah). The first math expectations I have been covering with the class are place value to 1000 and skip counting...nothing too complicated.

I have been reading picture books that focus on the theme of inclusivity. First we read Odd Velvet by Mary Whitcomb and worked through the structure I followed last year after reading The Power of Retelling.  I love following this structure because it keeps all of the comprehension strategies fresh in the student's minds. 

The first writing unit in Grade 3 is procedural writing so we did 2 different shared writing procedures to provide some examples for the students. These are the only real "classroom routines" I have tried to implement for the new teacher coming in. I hope they are okay with it. 

I was pleasantly surprised when I asked the class to make a mind map of everything they could think about math...and they came up with so many good ideas!

Here is a chart I made to illustrate the math goals we have been covering during our calendar time and during different class discussions. 

On Friday, we made this class bar graph about our birthdays. The other curriculum expectations that are covered in the beginning of the year is graphing and sorting so I thought that by making a bulletin board bar graph the students would have a HUGE anchor chart for how a bar graph should look...and it created a small sense of community when we could see when all our birthdays fell during the year. 

My biggest goal of these two weeks was to create a portfolio of diagnostic work to help the new teacher have a sense of where the students are academically and not feel as though they are coming in super late...it's what I would want someone to do for me. So in addition to the diagnostic tasks we have been working on creating a portfolio cover. I blogged about this art assignment a few years ago when I taught my own art (oh how I miss that!)

Lastly, we brainstormed all the things a good classmate is/ does/ says and is not...a great idea I found on Pinterest(!!) but is originally from Using My Teacher Voice. Hopefully, the new teacher coming can use this to create the classroom rules they want to have posted in their room. 

Well, there's my first week in a nutshell...and tomorrow I start my last week! What a weird feeling. 

A jumble of letters and patterns...

These are the finished Name Art Projects my students completed last year when I taught Grade 4. I originally posted about it here and I am super excited with how they turned out!

Here are a few of my favourites!

I am going to have my students complete a reflection of their own artwork and the projects of others posted in our room as a way to start developing some art appreciation. Here is the reflection if you would like to see it or use it in your own room.

AND.... don't forget about the Fantastic Finds Linky Party. What have you uncovered this week?

An Artful Celebration

It's done! No more observations. No more evaluations. Well, at least for 5 years. It's been a long time coming, a long time preparing and a long week of what felt like jumping through hoops.

On Monday I had my pre-observation meeting where my vice-principal and I went through the 16 competencies that teachers must display. I was required to outline 2 examples from my teaching practice for each of the 16 competencies and give evidence that supports each example. This meeting took about 40 minutes. Then on Tuesday and Wednesday my vice-principal came to observe a language lesson and a math lesson. I wasn't worried about the language lesson because I feel that area is my best as I have almost exclusively taught language for my 8 years as a teacher. However, math is another story. Last year was the first year I had even taught math and then I was only working for 4 months before I went on my maternity leave. So, needless to say I was very nervous about being observed during a math lesson...and a lesson on fraction no less!!

But it's all behind me now and time to think of other things! Like art.. We have been doing all sorts of art in my Grade 4 these days and each project has been building on the previous lesson.

We started looking at value in art works and shading techniques. I took a picture of each of my students, cut it in half and then they drew the other half back in only using a pencil and shading techniques.

Around their drawing they also added in contour drawings of objects that important meaning to their lives. I am very proud and impressed at the quality of work my students created. 

They worked so hard on these drawings!

After our contour drawings of our faces and important objects we moved on and are now studying 3D drawings and perspective. We combined this with our study of shading techniques- lines, cross hatching, stippling- and created these fabulous 3D rectangle drawings with a vanishing point in the middle of the page.

My students and I are now working on 1 point perspective drawings of a city street and I can not wait to see the finished products!!

Pictures! Anchor Charts! Freebies! Oh my!

SNOW DAY!!! Well, not really. The weather people predicted a ridiculous amount of snow for pretty much all of Ontario. We go....none of it really. At least, here in the GTA but the scare was enough that the school board cancelled all the busses and when you work at a school that is 98% bussed...well, not much happens. In case I haven't mentioned it before my school was built for 675 students...we currently have close to 1300 students!! WHAT? HOW?? I know, that's what everyone says. Well, we have 25 portables outside the main building. Yup, an entire school outside. There are 85 permanent staff working at my school everyday, K-8.

So, to get back on track with the busses being cancelled there were very few students at school today. My teaching partner and I combined our classes and we did a little art, a little geometry jeopardy and some movie watching. It was a relaxing day. It fit in well with the rest of my week where I have not brought my teacher bag home a single day and I have caught up on my hobbies. I think after a whirlwind few weeks of reports, assessments and strep throat I just needed some down time...BUT that doesn't mean we haven't been busy in my classroom.

Here's what we have been doing!

Learning about the benchmark angles. I used these great posters from Mary over at Guided Math.

We also brainstormed everything we knew about quadrilaterals- angles, sides, vertices, parallel ...you name it we thought of it. I was super impressed with my class on this day! Everything I wrote on these anchor charts was straight from them!

We've been working on these tessellation art projects since we were working on patterning during math. I like how they turned out but next year I will make sure to insist that my students stretch a little farther and attempt to create an object out of the tessellation shape they use. I found an amazing lesson plan online here...Go check it out! The kids can be sooooo successful with this. 

In writing we have started working on Narrative Writing and I have mainly been using the unit plan I purchased from Jen Runde's TPT store- Runde's Room. This is a FANTASTIC unit! The kids and I are loving it. 

My teaching partner had never seen the Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then strategy and is loving it. I have used it many times in the past and was once again happy with how effective it is for helping students understand the plot of a story.

This is our anchor chart about memorable characters. I'm not sure I agree with everything they said BUT at least Harry Potter, Anne Shirley and Laura Ingalls Wilder made the list!

And last but not least...

I found an amazing activity on this blog and decided to try it in my class. It turned out great!!!!

Last week when I introduced our Medieval Times unit I started with a time line of important world events to help my students gain a frame of reference for when the middle ages occurred. One of the events was the death of Martin Luther King which really caught their attention. So today we took a break from the middle ages and made these amazing MLK portraits and dream writings!! So proud!

Here is the small sheet I prepared for my students (FREEBIE) so they could write their own "I have a dream..." statements after we read a few picture books and watched some videos on MLK. Enjoy! The font I used is Scribbled for Sugarfrog Fonts. 

I hope you weathered the "storm" if it hit where you live, and if not I just hope you had a great Friday!