Learn about the artist Wasilly Kandinsky and make your own version of his famous Kandinsky circles picture, exploring colour theory

I saw this cool/warm colour theory lesson created by Patty over at Deep Space Sparkle and it instantly struck me that it would be perfect to use to create artworks of Ayers Rock and The Olgas in ou…

Over the last few weeks, my kindergartners have been learning about Three-Dimensional shape. Here are some of our favorite stations. Making a Town Using Three-Dimensional Shapes My students LOVED working with a friend and creating a part of the town. At large group time, we brainstormed what we needed to have in our town. Students made little signs and will soon be making maps of the town. We will also learn about creating and giving directions. I hope to have my students create an anchor chart of meaningful words we can use. We will continue to add to this! Guess My Secret Rule (Silent Math) During this lesson, the teacher begins to sort shapes into a pile. It is called Silent Math Time because no one can talk, including the teacher! Students will be called on silently. If a shape belongs it stays in the pile, but if the shape does not belong, the teacher will move it out. When the game is over, the teacher will talk. "Okay class, who can tell me what the secret rule is?" Shape Shadows What kind of shadow will a cylinder make? It was a little tricky to use a flashlight to see the shadows of the figures. But a colleague suggested we put it in the natural sunlight. The kids were amazed!! Guess My Shape One child is IT and takes an object out of the first bag and puts it in the second bag. We started the game with a cylinder, cone, sphere and the cube. The person who is IT gives two clues about the shape. I have a circle face. I have a point. What shape am I? The children playing the game, circle (on the recording sheet below) what shape they think it is. The sheet allows them to play four rounds. We first started playing this game with four shapes and added two more. After playing this game many times, the person who is IT can record their clues. Recording Sheets click here for GUESS MY SHAPE RECORDING SHEET Which Is Taller? Students compared different 3-D objects in the classroom focusing on symbols. Anchor Chart During interactive writing time, we recorded our observations about the three dimension shapes. We made illustrations of real world objects. My 3-D shape book My Vocabulary Chart I saw this chart in Debbie Diller's Math Work Station book and I love it! This chart is a very helpful tool for my students. click here for Vertices sheet Shape Hunt We went on a shape hunt looking for three-dimensional shapes in our environment. We took photos with our class I PADs and made a slideshow with Haiku Deck. 3 Dimensional Shapes - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires Sources: Think Math Debbie Diller Math Work Stations

Inside you'll find Easy Artist Trading Cards Ideas for Kids. Stop by and download lots of fun templates for free.

The designs, typically linear of Juan Miro, inspired us to realize our prints with styrofoam in the 6th grade classes. This material was cut from used food trays. The small plates have become the m…

2-ingredient walking rainbow experiment! Teach color theory and capillary action with this rainbow walking water science experiment.

Rainbow oats sensory bin: how to dye oats for sensory play

Connecting different areas of the curriculum with art can be tricky. Particularly geography! Here is a quick and easy art idea that you can use to support the Australian Geography Curriculum in your classroom. It is particularly great for grades 3-4. Printables for this art activity can be found here. What you will need: Neon […]

Not sure when my obsession with installation art started but it's been unrelenting by holding my attention in a serious way for at least the...

It's been a while since I've posted a project - it always seems to be that I'll have a couple of weeks where we are "in process", then sudd...

Paul Klee was different from other artists, his sarcastic wit being one difference! Learn more about this artist with 10 Paul Klee Art Projects for Kids.

Sculpt Georgia O'Keeffe-inspired flowers, draw Warhol pop art, and color graffiti breakdancers with these awesome fifth grade art projects.

In May and June, we ran a competition to find the best and most inspirational classroom wall display. The winner received a whole set of classroom furniture! To share all these wonderful ideas, we thought that we'd showcase some of them in this blog post. Which is your favourite?

In this Frida Kahlo Inspired Portrait, students create their own self-portrait while incorporating pets and plants while learning about this art master.

TA 7- During term 3 Mrs Hancock introduced us to the Australian Aboriginal Artist Bronwyn Bancroft. Bronwyn is a remarkable artist and has illustrated many books. We created 2 tempera paintings, mixed media artworks for the Auction. Starting price for items 7A and 7B is $20 ea. Please note that item 7b is in landscape mode ( The blog wont display it the correct way) Happy Bidding TA 7

Hi Friends…. The past two weeks we have been working on Prefixes and Suffixes in our second-grade classroom! My kiddos were having such a good time brainstorming words with prefixes and then figuring out the meaning. They really had a strong grasp of the concept… I was pretty impressed. After our whole … Prefixes, Suffixes and a FREEBIE Just for YOU! Read More »

Each quarter, Gnomon holds a Best of Term competition to award and recognize the best student work created at the school during that individual term. Each Best of Term features artwork displaying a wide range of technical skills from full-time program students, extension students, and individuals enrolled in the Foundation in Art & Design course […]

As I’ve mentioned, this is going to be a fun year. We have some really cool artists for the 2011-2012 school year. We are beginning with the king of pop art: Andy Warhol! Just think Mari…

Fifth grade students are learning about the Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser . We talked about how he lived through the second ...

I didn't really share the outcome of my post-assessments last year, mainly due to the fact that there was some confusion around them with calculations. In the end, I "passed" and did all right, but my results weren't exactly where I wanted them to be for the post-assessment scores. Thus, I revamped two of my assessments. Last year, I did my SLO assessments in 5th, 2nd, 1st and Kindergarten. My LLO was in 4th grade. Lucky for me, I have one less to do this year! This year, my SLO assessments are with Studio Art, Art 7, and 1st grade and I chose to use Kindergarten for my LLO so I could revamp my rubrics. Today is our first Staff Development day and luckily, I have no place to be except in my classrooms working on my SLOs and LLO, which are technically due today! In the next few posts, I'm going to share with you my old assessments from last year and what I plan on doing differently this year. I'll also share with you how I am setting my goals, as I am doing something completely different this year as well. Last year I did a cutting and gluing rubric and I had a 97% success rate at students passing, which was great, but made it seem as though the assessment wasn't quite as rigorous as it should have been. So, this year, I changed up my plans for the Kindergarten assessment, and I've actually changed my mind twice about the pre-assessment. Back in September I shared a post with my ideas for this year, which you can see here. I originally gave students a shape sheet with fewer shapes and then a quiz that quizzed them on shapes, lines and basic color theory. I was struggling to figure out how I would make sure those kinders could read their color words by the end of the year to take a "quiz" (since I would essentially have to create a test bank), and then I decided to scratch that idea, after I had already given out that assessment. Now, I've decided to continue using the shape sheet for cutting and gluing but also the Hey Diddle Diddle Shape Cow project we just did. This way, I am still assessing their cutting and gluing skills, but also their ability to draw shapes, their use of crayons and how they color. As I looked at all of these projects, I realized that even though I was trying to teach them how to use the shapes and how to color properly, it's going to take a while for them to improve, so I should still be able to show growth. These are the two activities being used for the kindergarten pre-assessment... And these are the two rubrics being used for the kindergarten pre-assessments... At the end of the year, students will then be assessed on cutting & gluing, as well as their coloring and shape skills all in one project...the primary playground project! In that project, students have to cut out their own shapes and create a playground. It will assess their ability to cut out shapes that are discernible from one another, how well they glue the shapes down (still using the dot glue method), and how well they utilize their entire paper. Last year I did this as a review projects for primary colors and shapes, but it'll make a great end of the year assessment, I think. Instead of having the students do it on 9"x12" paper, I'll give them the bigger sheets like I did for their pre-assessment cows. Two kindergarten examples from last year, done back in February. And this is the revamped rubric for assessing the post-assessment. I know these rubrics are hard to read...I'm doing this at school right now and don't have a nicer way of taking a screen shot, so you can find them on the SmARTteacher.

4th Grade Warm or Cool Birch Trees Fourth grade has been working hard on their mixed media birch trees, for the past couple of weeks. Here's how we created ours.... First, they had to choose if they were going to do WARM colors (Red, Orange, & Yellow) or if they were going to use COOL colors (blue, purple, and green). Then, they painted their backgrounds with Prang tempera cakes, on 12x18 pieces of 90lb paper. After they finished painting, they could start on their birch trees. we used half of a 12x18 sheet, drew them out with rulers, and traced the bark lines with Sharpie markers. The next class, we finished our trees, cut them out and glued them on! Here's a few working on their birch tree paintings.

Celebrate New Year & Chinese New Year with engaging art and writing activities. Encourage students to reflect, set new goals, and plan New Year resolutions

Don't miss these Adorable Kindergarten Worksheets for May. Get the math and literacy practice with the fun of flowers, bugs, and gardens.

Help! My students don’t remember the parts of speech! Yep, we’ve all been there. You start a grammar lesson, only to realize that your students don’t remember the basics. It’s not that they don’t understand grammar and syntax; they just forgot the technical terms (nouns, verbs, adjective, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections) that they need […]

'Social Emotional Learning' seems to be the new buzz word/term going around in the education world. What I love about this is that it is encouraging a child-first perspective in everything we teach. We have always used this lens to view education, so it is wonderful to see it spreading! "Social and emotional learning (SEL) is an integral part of education and human development. SEL is the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions." One way we support this learning in our classroom is using the Zones of Regulation. We have worked through the 4 different Zones of Regulation over the past month. Our students are now feeling experts and have demonstrated a good understanding of which feelings associate with which Zone. We used books and videos to work through the different feelings. Our first week we spent time reading books and watching videos about all feelings in general. We then focused on a specific zone for the week, reading a variety of books and then talking through what it looks like, sounds like and feels like in that zone to end our week. We used Story Bots videos for introducing many of the feelings. We put up all our signs in a way that helps students understand up and down regulation. When you are up-regulated, you need to down regulate to come back to the green zone. If you're down regulated, you need to up regulate back into the green zone. We then talked about ways we can up and down regulate to help ourselves get back to the green zone. Students loved using breath to help calm them, so we began recording the various breaths we can use. We are continuing to introduce new breaths they can use. Students shared their learning through drawing, writing and using loose parts. If you want to get these books for your classroom/personal library you can see my Amazon Storefront, I have a 'self-regulation/mindfulness' book list: https://www.amazon.ca/shop/wonderfullinquiry?listId=BTDC6FZWSO61 *Please note I get a small fee for most purchases made*

Marc Chagall believed in painting from the heart and that's what he did! Learn more about this amazing artist with 10 Marc Chagall Art Projects for Kids.

Step by step instruction of how to create cakes like Wayne Thiebaud. This is a fun project for all ages and can be developed even further with oil pastels, pastels or paint!

First graders have been working on this painting the past few weeks. We are studying weather patterns and having fun learning new technique...

by jennifer_alvarado_art ift.tt/1Vz3yHG

Ok, just because I've been gone from 'blogging land' doesn't mean we haven't been working hard in 4B. I've definitely been documenting a lot of what we've been doing! To start, it was clear to me that our old way of peer conferencing just wasn't working. Kids seemed to be goofing around, not really helping each other, and it was a waste of everyone's time. It frustrated me when most of my one-on-one conference time was spent managing unruly PEER conferences. I knew something had to change. I decided to revamp our workshop so that our peer conferences would hold both the author and the peer more accountable AND work on our 6-traits language. I introduced our 'new' method for peer conferencing using this anchor chart to document our process. After students finish drafting, they are to grab a 6-traits peer conferencing sheet and assess themselves by circling all the descriptors for each trait that they feel match their own writing. Mind you, we did a lot of whole-class practice with scoring writing based on the 6-traits criteria so students would feel comfortable doing this process on their own (and being HONEST!). Through our mini-lessons we've learned that it's possible to have high scores in some traits but lower scores in others. That's how we grow! Here you see Devin circling where he thinks his writing falls on our 6-traits rubric. (Note: The link to the 6-traits peer conferencing sheet above will bring you to an even more updated version than the one shown in this blog posting! Just FYI!) Here's another student assessing her own writing after she's drafted. This student has finished assessing her writing using our rubric. She decides on a final number score and circles it to the left of the descriptors. Then it's time to meet with a peer. (We have a peer conference sign-up sheet in our room which helps students know which other students in the room are also ready to peer conference.) Here you see this author reading his story to his peer. After he's done reading, he will explain to his peer the scores he gave himself and why. It's important for the peer to listen carefully to the author because it will soon be her turn to assign a score to this author for each trait . On the lines on the rubric, she will write to explain the scores she gives him. The peer needs to follow the following sentence stems in his/her scoring response: * I give this a writer a ___ because... * This writer needs to work on ... This process requires peers to truly work together, hold each other accountable, and it gets the kids using our 6-traits language a lot more. The second sentence stem helps the writer establish a goal for what to work on when revising! To see more of this peer conferencing process, watch a clip of us practicing this stage! Our focus lately has been on the trait of organization. We've been looking thoroughly at different beginnings and endings of both student and published writing. Here is our anchor chart documenting what we noticed! In other Writer's Workshop news, these are a few additional anchor charts we have in our room to help keep our writing organized. This anchor chart reminds us of powerful words to use to spice up 'said'! In reading we have been working hard on purposeful talk.This is so very important to the social construction of knowledge in any classroom! It's essential to teach students purposeful talk behaviors before even considering literature discussion groups (LDGs). The majority of kids talk like...well, KIDS! So, if we expect kids to talk like mature young people about different texts they read, we need to explicitly teach them how! Talking about Text by Maria Nichols is a great place to start if you're interesting in learning more about purposeful talk behaviors. I taught each of the behaviors individually through two separate mini-lessons - one day to explain 'hearing all voices' in a concrete way (without text), and a second day to practice 'hearing all voices' using text. Then I taught 'saying something meaningful' in a concrete way without using text, and the next day we practiced 'saying something meaningful' using text , and so on. Eventually all of the purposeful talk behaviors kind of blended together and kids started to discover that we often need to use all of these things at the same time in order to truly talk purposefully about anything! We did a lot of practicing, and I've been taping students in this process. Here is a clip of students practicing their behaviors while they talk about their families. (We had read a few books about different kinds of families to foster a safe environment to celebrate the fact that we all have different kinds of families!) We also had students practice their purposeful talk behaviors while discussing their best or worst memory in school (which helped warm up their brains for a timed writing activity we did during writer's workshop). Here is a clip! As a class, we watched these video clips to analyze our body language and other purposeful talk behaviors. I think taping and analyzing is a very effective way for students to learn how they should look and sound in an LDG. 'Keeping the lines of thinking alive' is a tough concept for many youngsters. Sometimes what happens is that students take turns talking, but they don't really build on what the person before them said. In other words, they don't really DISCUSS, they just share and listen. We applauded the first group in this clip because they had good body language and were respectful as listeners, but we discovered their conversation needed to be more 'alive' by asking questions and making connections to each other's ideas and thoughts. Mrs. Pierce and I taped ourselves doing a weak LDG and a strong LDG. As we watched each example, we used dots and lines to 'map out' our conversations (see chart below). In the weak LDG, we discovered Mrs. Pierce and I shared a lot of individual thoughts. The thought started, and then it stopped. There was really no discussion about anything we said; and Mrs. Pierce wasn't even looking at me during part of our time together! How rude! ;) In the strong LDG example, we mapped out a lot of dots and lines that were connected because we took each other's ideas and built on them. We truly discussed the text to dig deeper. We introduced several conversational moves for students to use to help get their voice heard in a conversation. Students also have these conversational moves on a bookmark that they keep in their LDG books. After we learned the respectful ways to speak and act when discussing with others, it was time to teach our kids how to flag their thinking. This is a crucial step to holding a successful literature discussion group because it allows the kids to track their important thoughts while reading so they have ideas for discussion the next day. Here are the 'codes' we use to track our thinking on post-its. We encourage students to use one of our codes to categorize the kind of thought they have and then write a few words to trigger their thought. This helps them when they get into a discussion group; they'll actually have pinpointed ideas to discuss! Students kept a chart in their Thoughtful Logs with all of our codes on it for easy reference. Here's a clip of our students as they practice flagging their thinking for the first time. The next day, students put all their new learning to the test. We put them in small groups to discuss the text "Slower Than the Rest" which is a short realistic fiction story out of Cynthia Rylant's book Every Living Thing. On another day, we used a high-interest two-page non-fiction text about leeches to continue practicing flagging our thoughts. Here's a clip of our kids flagging their thinking just after we modeled it during our mini-lesson. Below are some pictures of the kids' flagged thoughts. In addition to purposeful talk, we've also been studying the historical fiction genre. We've read several mentor texts, including Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner and Dandelions by Eve Bunting. Our first round of literature discussion books are all within the historical fiction genre. Here are a few of our historical fiction LDGs hard at work: Dear Levi: Letters from the Overland Trail Scraps of Time: Abby Takes a Stand The River and the Trace (I think I put my finger over the microphone at minute 2:00!) Oftentimes, historical fiction books will have a flashback in them. One group's book, called A Scrap of Time: Abby Takes a Stand by Patricia McKissick, has a flashback that occurs towards the beginning of the story. I photocopied some of the pages to try to explain this technique during a whole class mini-lesson. In the first section of the book, three grandkids are spending time with their grandma in her attic. They find an old menu and ask their grandma why she saved it. Chapters 1 through 12 flash back to 1960, where 'grandma' is just 10-years-old, living in Nashville, Tennessee at the time of a lot of civil rights protests. The menu is from a restaurant where a lot of sit-ins took place. Through the flashback a reader learns all about life during the 1960s. In the final section of the book, a reader finds him/herself back in the present - in grandma's attic, where the three grandkids ask their grandma some questions about her life during the sixties. There was also another flashback in the story Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner. We also read The Wreck of the Zephyr by Chris VanAllsburg as an example of a flashback in a fantasy book! In other reading news, here is a picture of the anchor chart that stored all the non-fiction text features we've learned. In social studies, we've been studying the economy of the five U.S. regions. Students have been reading small sections of non-fiction leveled readers to summarize a product or industry that is important to each region's economy. Students are typing up their summaries and we're calling those summaries 'articles' as they each create a magazine of our economy. Through this project, students have learned to: * Summarize main ideas * Center and left-justify their cursor * Use the tab key to indent * Change font size, color, and style * Bold, underline, and italicize * Safe image searches * Copy and paste * Cite their picture resources Here is the inside of one student's magazine. Next week we will be using this site to create magazine covers! Lastly, we had a chance to meet with our second-grade buddies earlier this month. We split the buddies up into two groups and one group stayed with Mrs. Adams to play holiday bingo. The other group was with me in the computer lab. Buddies used this site to play a variety of math and English games. One of the most popular games to play was called 'Story Plant' where students could click on different leaves to create the beginning to a unique story. Depending on what leaves were clicked, you would get a different combination of characters, settings, problems, etc. The computer generates a beginning to a story that the kids can print off and finish during writer's workshop! Have a wonderful weekend!

Howdy y'all! Lindsay here . . . Well, since Kacie from Doodle Bugs is taking a well-deserved break from her fabulous Five For Friday link...

I’ve got another fun Aussie activity for you! This wattle art was actually JJ’s idea, inspired by our bottlebrush paintings that we shared yesterday, and also from the memory of Bee and I using the same yellow glitter glue a few months back, for our wattle collages. (I just love it when the girls extend upon my ideas to come up with their own – that’s the aim of the game!) (This post contains affiliate* links to similar products.) For …

By Julia Gamolina Paula Scher is one of the most acclaimed graphic designers in the world. She has been a principal in the New York office of the distinguished international design consultancy Pentagram since 1991, where she has designed identity systems, environmental graphics, packaging an

Kids will love making this spooky Blinking Origami Eyeball art project, inspired by Krokotak, a really awesome Bulgarian Kids website!

The website BabyccinoKids.com was acquired by SLOTXOGAME88.Net on March 28, 2023.

So I've been spending the last few weeks going through the curriculum for my district and starting to accumulate some resources. I LOVE the science topics I get to teach this year. One lesson focuses on classifying animals. We discuss vertebrates and invertebrates, and then we classify vertebrates into more specific categories: mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. I just remember really enjoying this lesson as a kid. Below is an anchor chart I've made that shows, and briefly summarizes, each of the main vertebrate categories. It is a 16x20 anchor chart. I designed this one myself, because I couldn't find anything on Pinterest (or elsewhere) that fit my needs exactly. The descriptions were taken from our science textbook (Houghton Mifflin). All the fonts I used (including the little animal dingbats) are from dafont.com. As always, the pattern/color scheme matches my classroom theme. I can't wait to get into the classroom, get all of my stuff up and take pictures! Enjoy!