Mrs. G's Books of the Month

I am a huge reader and I try to encourage all my students to read as a part of their daily life. Every month I want to share an art book that really spoke to me as well as a few books in the young adult genre that they may be interested in!

Art Books:
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards

My drawing classes are probably going to be sick and tired of me mentioning this book- but it is revolutionary. I remember struggling SO MUCH with drawing when I got to college. I felt like I had some great skills through high school but when I got to my first drawing class I was SO intimidated. I felt as if I was so much more below everyone else. I got incredibly frustrated and lost a lot of confidence.

One of my art professors handed me their personal copy of this book and it has changed the way I draw. It made me realize that drawing is not about how you draw something, but how you see and look at your subjects. We as people use our left side of our brain so much through the day but when it comes to receiving visual information, we need to tap into our right brain to get the full grasp on looking at something. This book breaks down exactly how to do that and gives us scientific studies on why it is true. An excellent read for anybody of any age wanting to learn how to draw better!

 

Young Adult Books:
Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
This is a young adult novel in a fantasy world that focuses on a series of thieves and criminals. They are binded together to pull off an incredible heist. This book is SO much fun. The characters are so witty, funny and unique from many other characters in books. They are all morally grey characters which makes them so much more interesting. The ACTION. THE ACTION. Yes there is action. The story is so fast paced and there are so many twists and turns. I could not put it down. This is an excellent book for anybody who likes heist stories like in Ocean's Eleven and Fast Five. This is something also that I think both boys and girls will equally like. LOVED IT!

Happy reading!

Mrs. Garrett

WOW WHERE HAS TIME GONE?

I feel so bad for abandoning my blog for over two and a half months! I guess that is what I get for working an extra retail job- during the holidays!!!! Guys it's no joke. I don't see how some of you do it. How you work a second job alongside teaching and still manage to perform wonders in the classroom. I definitely could tell my teaching was suffering because I was so tired from working the night before. It really wasn't worth the extra money getting by with "mediocre" lessons because I didn't have the extra time or energy to put into my kids. So needless to say, I am BACK with only teaching. I have been enjoying my weekends off this month. It did not dawn on me until yesterday that until now, I worked 7 days a week ALL last semester...... That makes me want to puke.


I'm very excited for my classes this semester! I am also teaching a Cinema Studies course for juniors on A days which is SO much fun! I look forward to sharing everything else with you.


Please keep coming back! I promise you won't be disappointed!


Blessings,

Mrs. G

Op Art Cubes

 So it has been a GOOD while. Lots of crazy things happening over here in class--- well not necessarily in class but my life in general. Fall break was in October so we all enjoyed a whole glorious week without classes :)

Also, we just wrapped our first 9 week grading period so there was lots of paperwork and parent phone calls on my end. I also had a few personal things come up- family deaths, sickness and professional development seminars. I feel like it's taken quite a while to get this Op Art unit over with. I've finally found some down time to post pictures of the final products!

Our display in the classroom. I can't find an area around school to display our work just yet so I've taken advantage of these white, bland, ugly blinds I have in my room and have been hanging work on them. The kids really like seeing what kind of work is coming out of the other art classes. 

 

And here are some close ups of some of the ones that are hung up. 

I was so surprised that there was only one black and white one out of all of my students????

Love the bright colors with the blacks on this one!

Great detail!

Overall, I'm very happy with how they turned out. However, I do feel like my kids were capable of adding much, MUCH more detail. Next year I will take more time to teach them more intricate designs. We also used regular crayola markers and I know it makes a HUGE difference when we use permanent markers instead. Will definitely make note of that for next year. 

Thanks for stopping back by! Hopefully it won't be this long before I return once again.

Blessings,

Mrs. Garrett

Graffiti Final Projects

Our graffiti projects were due today!

During our unit we talked about various artists like Banksy, Basquiat and TAKI 183. The assignment was to create a "tag name" and create a graffiti style drawing of their signature. The requirements were that their name had to be at least 8 characters long and were encouraged to use numbers and symbols (though some of them just used their name). They also had to color their letters at least 3 different colors and were required to do a "ripple design" background. However, I saw some of my students making their own backgrounds and after seeing how creative they got, I let them kind of take of with it.

Ok, I am seriously BLOWN AWAY at these graffiti projects! They came out FANTASTIC!

I literally stared at some of them for up to 5 minutes before writing their grade on their rubric. I was honestly left speechless during my grading process. Usually with my batch of projects, most of them are decent, with a handful of 'WOW" ones....NOT THIS TIME. AT LEAST HALF OF THEM WERE AMAZING.

Moments like this is when I am reminded why I got into this field of work. I love art SO MUCH. It's very discouraging sometimes when no matter what you do, you just can't get your students to see how wonderful art really is. And then there are these moments where they just absolutely surprise you by how creative and talented they are. And several of these came from students who said "I just can't draw". YES THEY CAN!

And with this school specifically, with such a large ELL population, watching my non-English speaking students create something so striking and being so proud of it. And watching the look on their faces when I tell them how AMAZING their art work looks... it's just awesome. I'm so thankful for my job, this school and for my students.

Beginning our graffiti unit

So last week was an absolute CRAZE of a week.

 I found out at the very last minute on Monday that I was going to miss not one, not two....but THREE days that week for SIOP training. THREEEE DAYS????? I thought I was going to cry myself to sleep... School has JUST started, I finally have my kiddos down in a routine, I JUST started a new unit, progress report grades are due the following MONDAY... and now I have to be out three days... LAWD HAVE MERCY. I stayed after school Tuesday for almost 3 hours getting all of my sub work together. And at the end of the week I didn't even get the work back from my students.

After the long and stressful week, knowing that my classroom was an absolute disaster at the end of every day my sub was here, I just went home and tried to forget about EVERYTHING during my nice, 3 day weekend. I've learned as a teacher, when it comes to sub days, there is absolutely NOTHING you can do sometimes. Things are going to be out of your control. And you just need to pick your battles. I feel like if I made a huge deal over every little thing that went wrong during one of my sub days, then I would be ranting for days.


That being said, we have started our next unit which is graffiti. The m
ain thing I am struggling with right now is classroom enthusiasm. With my middle schoolers, I felt like I could not get them to SHUT UP about anything! They were SO excited about art and always had SOMETHING to say in class about what we were doing. It about drove me up a wall... But now I actually miss that. Because my high schoolers now are still tired from summer. I'm really hoping that this unit wakes them up and strikes their interest because it's one of my absolute FAVORITES.

So I usually start off my graffiti unit by doing a lot of discussions. Where can you find graffiti? Where do you see the most graffiti at? What are the characteristics? What makes graffiti letters different from written letters? How do they use variation of lines to create their letter styles? Should graffiti still be considered art even if it is used for vandalism? There are so many great conversations you can have in class. It's important for me as well that I teach them the history and evolution of graffiti- how it was used during the 60s by political activists, why gang members use it and where and how a lot of cities are working to legalize it by establishing designated graffiti areas in their city.

We look at different graffiti in different cities/countries. My students usually really enjoy seeing European graffiti, it's very elaborate. Then I usually spend the day teaching them how to draw different graffiti styles.

I really enjoyed doing this with them today. I can definitely tell their confidence in their skills were rising after this because graffiti can definitely be indimidating. Here are a few of the practice sheets. (I highly recommend getting some of that elementary writing paper, it really helps them with their scale and proportions.)

 

 

~Mrs. Rogers

More Zentangle Hands

I finally finished grading all of our zentangle projects last night. I saw some VERY good ones and had to share them!

I do apologize for the horrible lighting.

I just love the contrast with the colored pencil!

This guy really went crazy with his detailed designs!

I mean...WHOA!!!

Looooooove the details.

 

~Mrs. Rogers

Zentangle Hands

So for my first project, I wanted to focus on the element of line. I wanted to do an assignment that required some focus but also was simple enough to understand for all my EL students. Zentangles have gotten extremely popular in art classes around the country in the past years so I decided to do a project over it. I think overall the kids enjoyed it and it was very quiet in my room during this- which is ALWAYS a good thing!

So the guidelines were that they were to use only one color for the background and they can be as creative as they want with their hand drawing. I would have loved to have done this in black sharpies, but I sadly didn't have any this early in the year. I highly recommend doing it in sharpies. They just look better and it takes them longer to complete it with sharpies as well. That's okay though, we live and learn.

But I am enjoying some of these colorful backgrounds! Here are just a few you can see. These are just a few that finished early, there are more awesome ones on the way!

 

More later!!!