I forgot about one of my good ideas this year! I was lucky enough to get some money donated to my program. My first instinct was to get something to help with clay presentation. I found these great phone/tablet stands on eBay. A two pack was only 99 cents! I purchased enough for one grade level to be displayed at a time. They work awesome! They fold up so that they don't take up much ..read more

I posted about my first snag a few weeks ago, but this week I had my first big victory. At my primary school I want to have five permanent stations; drawing, painting, collage, fibers, and art preparation. I don't have enough shelving to create these stations, though so I went into planning mode. I am very fortunate that our district employs an extremely talented carpenter, who builds things for ..read more

Eric Carle's Tiny Seed is a wonderful book for young kids. They love catching on that it's a circle story and enjoy how big the flower gets in the story. I read it to my first graders prior to making these cute Tiny Seed flowers. Students received two pieces of paper. On the first one, they traced on stem, one circle, two leaves, and seven petals. We discussed analogous colors and ..read more

Here I am, all set and determined to transition to TAB next year and I found out one of my schools is changing again. While this is totally fine with me, and was expected with our elementary boundaries changing, the school I am moving to the art room is shared with music, orchestra, and Chinese. I am still planning on implementing TAB, but now I need to figure out how to make my stations easy to ..read more

   Two of my texture paintings are included in the Annual Member Spotlight Art Show at The Phipps Center for the Arts. The show is virtual this year, and here is the video.      ..read more

  This year marks my seventeenth year of teaching elementary art. It is odd to think I've been in the classroom for that long, but I've picked up a few things along the way and this post shares some of the more unusual items that I use on a regular basis in my art room, and explains what I do with those items. Click the image to be directed to an Amazon Affiliate link to the product!  I use these ..read more

Here is another great idea to share. I actually saw this at a Home Depot Kids' Workshop. One of the other parents did it for their child and I thought it was brilliant. I have been using the idea in my classroom for years now.  All of my aprons are adult size, so for the smaller kids I put on waist tie through the neck before tying it. This pulls the top of the apron higher on the child to ..read more

Like many-dare I say most?-elementary art teachers, I use a lot of children's books in my art classroom. Recently, there have been many posts in different art teacher Facebook groups asking about favorite books for the classroom, prompting me to create a list of books, organized by categories; artists, inspiring, cultural, elements, principles, character traits/SEO, diversity/inclusion ..read more

   Fourth grade is working on understanding how to mix value with paint. They've learned about hue, tint, tone, and shade and have chosen a project to demonstrate their learning with. Luckily, our fourth graders have Chromebooks, so we use Google Classroom and I put all of the resources linked in this post on their GC for them to teach themselves how to create the projects while I circulated and ..read more

Wow, it sure has been a long time since I have posted here. Sorry about that, I got a new schedule with very little prep time. However, after a lot of thinking and research I am now convinced that I should transition to a TAB (Teaching for Artistic Behavior) classroom and I thought that it might be nice to chronicle my journey from a DBAE (Discipline Based Art Educator) to a TAB teacher for any ..read more