1 Point Perspective

 I have seriously avoided teaching 1 point perspective for years!!!!! Never having a high rate of success with this particular lesson I decided my elementary students just weren't ready for it.

Then I saw the new curriculum guide from my district during planning week and was NOT amused. Because that's when I realized I would be stuck doing this lesson with my 4th AND 5th graders. And since we NOW have the dreaded End of Course Exams I had to do this......

I do, on occasion, have students working with rulers in my art room. Not my fault they never seem to remember this when sitting in the Middle School art room. I even have a sign in my room demonstrating how to hold a ruler.  Anyway........ It occurred to me, perhaps, if I scaffold this lesson maybe, just maybe it would be successful. 

   

The first day of this two day lesson (roughly 50 minute classes) we practiced using a ruler.  The sheet on the left with the dots in a cross formation was what my students practiced with. When I subbed a very long time ago I found a copy of that sheet as part of a set of parabolic lines. While it is cool to see straight lines create the illusion of curved lines, I thought it more important to use this sheet to build muscle memory for drawing straight lines.  The above photo on the right was what the students did in their sketchbook to learn what 1 point perspective was all about. I found the worksheet they used here.

 

 

The rest of the class time was spent walking around the room helping students understand how to hold and use the ruler to make straight lines. And helping them with the back lines on the houses they drew in their sketchbooks.

The following week for the actual lesson I wanted my students to do a bird's eye view of a city. I did give them small square and rectangle tracers to use for the tops of the buildings. I modeled for them on my Elmo (a brand of document camera that projects what I'm doing onto the white board). And I'm here to tell you that the scaffolding WORKED!!! I did need to REMIND students to make the dot for the vanishing line, but, overall I was just thrilled with the results. When one of the 5th grade teachers saw what they were doing, she asked that I give her the finished work for a future geometry lesson to count vertices. Oh yeah!!!!

 

 

 

We did take some time discussing why artists, especially architects learn to draw from different perspectives. Students that caught on quickly were helping other students or adding some interesting details to their buildings like helipads, roof pools, one even had a tight rope across 2 buildings, perhaps remembering this lesson from a few years ago? They added windows, signs, cars and traffic lines. 

Lessons that are successful always make for a happy day! Thanks for reading!!

Presenting at the FAEA Conference

Look! Listen! And Learn! was the workshop I presented first thing on Thursday morning, which was the first day of the conference. It wasn't quite as well attended as I had hoped for, but, there were a lot of choices for that time slot. Anyway I thought it went really well.

I started off with the above slide of my power point. On the tables were different words from the list below. This activity is called Conversation Starter and was a way to get some discussions going about the art work shown on the screen. It will help students to learn the correct vocabulary to use when discussing art.

  

Next we did the activity You Be the Critic.

 You can read about how well it went when I did it with my 4th graders here.

Then we were Curating with Postcards.

 

Blogged about doing this with my students here. 

Then I did this activity that I had never done with my students. See the photo on the left for the steps.

 

 

Each person was given an envelope (with a number on it) inside was a postcard of a painting, tracing paper and different colored index cards. I posted the steps, on the power point, one at a time, giving people a few minutes to respond. After all the directions were given people grouped together according to the number on their envelopes. Then they had a discussion based on what they had written down on their index cards. I believe they were a bit surprised to find when they were grouped together it was because they all had the SAME postcard.  

The workshop was scheduled for 2 hours and I am happy to say that the 4 activities I choose worked really well in that time frame. I was able to give out goodies from Faber-Castell, they also provided a door prize for both of my presentations. My suitcase weighed a ton with all the swag I packed.

Also gave out pins from the Art of Ed and included some info about The Baker Museum and Traveling Exhibits.  To get the goodies I gave out, I emailed representatives  from those companies beforehand.

 

My presentation on blogging which I titled Born to Blog on Friday was very well attended. I used the power point that I made for the Carousel of Bloggers that I was a part of at the NAEA in New Orleans. I did add a few informational slides that were helpful for actually starting a blog.

 

There was a lot of great feedback from people and I hope I inspired a few of them to start their own blog.

I really enjoyed presenting.  I attended a President's Reception and got to mingle with Karen Noble, our outgoing President, and our new President Nicole Crane along with the other presenters. I even got this awesome certificate and a nice thank-you note.

And on another note- My niece, who is a math teacher up north, decided to Google: Storybook Character Costumes for Teachers and look what she found! ME in the second row! You can learn how I made that costume here  and what book inspired it! 

 

Thanks for reading!! Would love to hear from people who have presented at conferences. What did you present? How was your experience? Would you do it again?

My State Conference 2015

 I just returned from Naples where my state art educators conference was held. IT WAS A BLAST!! It absolutely amazed me, the effort put forth by all involved parties. The FAEA board members and their committees, the presenters (of which I was one) AND all the vendors that let us loot them, I mean gave us free samples.

I went to so many marvelous workshops, my head is about to explode! Thinking of ditching all my lesson plans for next week and just sharing what I learned!!

Okay I presented first thing Thursday morning and again on Friday afternoon. More details to follow on that as I am exhausted......  However, strongly feeling the urge to highlight what I learned!

After my workshop AND in the very same room was this awesome workshop titled Clay Critters which was presented by a speech pathologist by the name of Suz. She uses simple rhymes to help students remember the steps to take to complete a clay critter.

 

Really happy one was a lion, because that's my school's mascot! Mine is on the left, the other is one of Suz's samples.

I then attended a workshop titled Foil Action Figures led by Robert. He really makes his students think about what their figure is doing and has them place the figure in a scene appropriate to the action.

 

And much later that same day was workshop number 4....... ( remember the one I presented and the three I attended).

 

Textured Dragons and Castles presented by Chantel. That was really fun and I have many of the supplies needed to do this really great lesson. Pretty exhausted by the end of the first day!
Loved each and every presentation!

On Friday I presented on blogging and attended a workshop titled FAN-Tastic Mini Folding Fans with Chinese Brush Watercolor Markers presented by Debra and Melissa.  I was so tired I forgot to take lots of photos. So here's what I was working on.

We also had our division meeting AND I played in the vendors hall. Picture a really big room set up with dozens of tables, some vendors had "make it and take its," and many tables were loaded with a ton of free samples!! OH YEAH!!! A BIG THANK YOU TO Blick, Sax, Sargent Art, Pacon, Faber-Castell and so many more! I can't imagine what it takes to put all of that together and travel from state to state with all that stuff.

Above are ONLY some of the goodies I got to take home!

Saturday I attended a presentation by Cindy Walker, from Davis Publications. I have attended her presentations in the past and just LOVE her! It was titled Photography-Through the Lens-A View to the World and now I really, really want to teach photography!

Later that same day was a Hands-On Presentation by Matthew Reinhart. OMG! He is an amazing pop-up book artist! Seriously AMAZING! GOOGLE him! And a really nice guy!

 

 Above are some of the sample things I learned to do. Below is the balcony of the hotel I stayed in where I ate breakfast and relaxed at the end of my VERY full days!

 And all of the days were made that much better by having Erika as my roommate! We met at a 2014 summer workshop and get along great!

Thanks for reading and I promise to go into more detail soon! Drop me a comment about your state's conference!

First Year Reflections

One year ago today I returned from the FAEA conference in Daytona Beach. The very next day October 5th I posted my very first blog entry! In the past year I've written 77 posts and, as of this moment, have had 20,895 page views. I gotta say I'm pretty happy with those statistics.

My blog looked very different a year ago. I have learned a lot since then. I believe I have also covered many different topics over the past year. From professional development: in Santa Fe, at Penn State and online with The Art of Education to getting free stuff in the form of grants or just getting lucky!  

   

 I have written about using recycles to make art here, and here. 

The FAEA conference takes place starting on Thursday, October 8th. I will be presenting a workshop on using museum activities in the art room. Which I wrote about in this post and this post.

 

Attention Florida Educators: There is still available space! It is on Thursday morning and it's titled Look! Listen! And Learn! AND I have some amazing goodies to give out! A big THANK YOU to Faber-Castell and The Art of Ed for their donations.

I will also be doing a presentation on blogging on Friday, October 9, titled Born to Blog. It is similar to the one that I was a part of in New Orleans at the NAEA conference. Details here!

My blog is intended to INSPIRE! While many of my projects have been ones I came up with on my own-there are SO many wonderful art teachers out there that blog and inspire. The project that I am doing with my 3rd, 4th & 5th graders are one of those projects.

 

 We are exploring how to show movement with lines. We also had a discussion on craftsmanship.

 

 

I originally found the lesson on Pinterest but then managed to track down the directions with some wonderful visuals THANKS to Art with Mr. E. Check it out!

Thank you to all of you reading this.  I hope you will all agree it's been a great first year!

If you enjoy reading my blog, please consider following me or joining my Google circle. Thanks!