Class Snowflake Project

Happy Holidays!

A simple, traditional and fun winter art activity is the class snowflake project. For this, I used two different basic templates for students to use as guides and then cut to make their own patterns.

They look great all together up in the hall, and make the school look more festive and ready for winter!

Something that you pass everyday Studio Project

This year I started doing Something that you pass everyday Studio Project. This encourages students to become more aware of inspiration that they might find all around them. The goal of the project is to find something that they pass everyday that they can use as inspiration for a drawing.

Once the drawing is complete, they colour it traditionally (with watercolour paint, pastels, pencil crayons or markers- depending on the available supplies), or digitally (Photoshop or another image program- depending on available resources).

Here is an example the I recently completed of a window that I pass by everyday. Most days, I walk by it without noticing it, but one day, it caught my eye and I saw how beautiful it was and took a quick picture for future reference. I did a drawing from the photo and the coloured it in Photoshop.

Environmental Art Project!

The Eco Club at my school recently completed this awesome project building some robots out of cardboard to encourage students and staff to properly dispose of used markers and old batteries.

The first robot is Marker-bot and kids are encouraged to feed it old markers.

The next one is Zap-bot and kids can feed it old batteries. 

This kind of project is great because it's a fun way to raise awareness about how to properly dispose of certain products and gets kids asking why. It is also an interdisciplinary project that combines visual arts and social studies with a co-curricular club. 

- Patrick

C'est l'halloween!

As part of the Extended French team, my colleague and I put together these quick and easy French Halloween Costumes- and it was a fun guessing game for the kids to figure out what we were dressed as- can you guess?

The Principle of Design: Pattern

As I work through the elements and principles of design with my students, I try to find engaging and achievable projects to highlight the potential of each. The School of Islamic Geometric Design is a great site for patterns and got some fantastic ideas for a memorable pattern design studio project here: http://www.sigd.org/resources/pattern/

There are so many beautiful patterns all around the Aga Khan Museum. It would be great to include a field trip to the museum to explore pattern and find inspiration.

I first visited the museum a few years ago, see some photos in a previous post: here.

Patrick

Giant Blue Spruce - large scale studio project

A studio project that have found challenging and fun is a large scale drawing. I recently completed a large scale pencil drawing of a blue spruce tree. I scanned the drawing and coloured it in Photoshop.

A project like this creates a great opportunity for students to take risks, since it will be a long-term commitment and the results may not be what they initially wanted. This can be a memorable learning experience as it gives students who haven't tried something like this a seemingly insurmountable task to attempt and try to work through. Definitely a challenge and a memorable experience!

Patrick

Beautiful Jamaican Wildlife Poster

Check out this beautiful Jamaican Wildlife Poster- a wonderful educational resource by Liz:
https://sawwhetstudio.tumblr.com/

Creative billboard idea

This is great- the artist is the post linked to below replaced billboards with photos of the landscape that they're covering:

See the post here.

Teachers Pay Teachers

There are some great resources on the site Teachers Pay Teachers, for basically any content, level and detail you want to teach. It's great for ideas, activities and plans to get you started and to make your own for any class.

Recently I've been using some of the resource and I've added my Elements and Principles of Design worksheets, as well as a full Elements and Principles of Design Unit Plan, complete with lesson plans, suggested art studio activities and art history examples.

Cheers!

Patrick

Snow Art in Tokyo?!

This article is pretty interesting: I've seen mention of this in a few posts recently, Tokyo is seeing a lot of snow, and here are some of the creative responses, definitely worth a look, my favourite is the Jabba the Hutt:

https://www.boredpanda.com/heavy-snow-tokyo/

- Patrick