I recently had the honor of being interviewed by Mark Rode, the man behind the IG account @oxbow_creek_elementary_art Mark has a new blog called "Ask the Art Teacher" dedicated to teaching tips and getting to know art teachers through interviews. I was his second interview for the site. It's a great website and will be an outstanding resource as it grows. Check out my interview here ..read more

The blogging community is a wonderful source for ideas. It's one of the reasons I started blogging in the first place. Through reading blogs, I found many ideas that I adapted to teach in my classroom. I started the blog as a way to share my students' work as well as a way to return the favor in terms of putting new ideas out there.  It's rare, but I've found myself in a position that I haven't been in before in my teaching career. Having a 3D printer in the classroom is still pretty uncommon. Having a 3D printer in the art room is apparently far more uncommon.  When I first starte ..read more

I can safely say that 3D printing has been a hit. I have learned so much throughout the time it took to teach and print all of my 250 4th and 5th grade students. I started out working with 5th grade and changed how I taught by the time I started 4th grade simply because I learned so much about the process by teaching and printing 5th grade work. Simple things that I hadn't even considered wound up creating fairly major printing errors. Other things that I thought would be problematic wound up being fine.  I let my students choose to create whatever they wanted to print. We used a free ..read more

The future. It's here. At least it is in my art room.  Last year, I did some fundraising and wrote a grant in order to buy a 3D printer. My 3D dreams came true and I was able to purchase an Ultimaker 2+. I wound up ordering it last spring, but I didn't plan to use it until this year.  Prior to buying the printer, I hadn't ever used one before. I don't think I had ever seen one other than online pictures. A colleague had purchased one and raved about using it with students.  After I got the printer, I immediately started learning how to use it and figure what it is capable ..read more

Change.  It's something I've been thinking about quite a bit lately. I feel like I do a pretty good job as an art educator, but I'm intrigued by some new (or not so new) ideas that I've come across lately.  I suppose I should start by explaining my teaching style and background. Art has always been "my thing." I graduated from Columbus College of Art & Design and went directly into the Master's program for art education at The Ohio State University. My education has greatly influenced my style. Technique and technical skills were often at the heart of my own arts education.&nbs ..read more

Some bloggers write all summer long. Good for you if you're one of those all-stars! Summer is definitely a break from blogging for me. My school district started the year on August 15th. You may have noticed that I haven't posted since then. Is it because my summer lasted a little longer this year.  Do I know some sort of secret loophole embedded deep in my contract that allowed me to spend more time at the pool while the rest of the staff was busy teaching? Well, kind of.  That part of the contract would deal with paternity leave. My wife and I welcomed our second daughter into th ..read more

I was lucky enough to post a student teacher again this year. It was my fourth time in the last five years and it went extremely well. Based simply when student teachers are placed in my building, I often will have them work with students on a couple of projects that will wind up in the art show.  Miss Christie Paul, who was from The Ohio State University, worked with my students for a total of seven weeks. She had written this clay lesson previous to working with my students and I told her it was too cool not to use.  Miss Paul led discussions about the Terra Cotta warriors found ..read more

Here's the deal. It's been a long year. At the moment, I'm simply ready for summer. I have quite a few lessons that I was planning on writing posts for, but I'm just not going to get there. What I'll do instead is post some all-star student work from various lessons that I haven't had time to write about. I'll be back to blogging this fall. Enjoy! Happy summer! This first project is a 5th grade sgraffito mug lesson. Slab mugs topped with black underglaze. Sgraffito done with an underwater motif. Pretty rad. My example is the first image.  2nd Grade clay dinosaurs. Always a winner. C ..read more

I think Instagram has surpassed Pinterest in usefulness for me. Since Pinterest keeps adding pins of things THEY think will be interesting to me and things that THEY think I'll want to buy, half my feed is essentially junk. Conversely, there are a lot of art teachers who post relevant, real life lessons, ideas, and observations on Instagram daily. I've gotten a good amount of new lesson ideas this year from Instagram and I've had great success with them. If you want frequent updates from my classroom, follow me on Instagram @thomas_elementary_art One Instagram post by another teacher (@mrsal ..read more

Ok. Back to a regular posting schedule. I'm excited about this one. Really excited.  About this time last year, I scheduled my art show with an outside company called Artomé. My building keeps growing right along with my student population. Seriously. We're putting on our second addition as I'm sitting here typing this. I decided to use Artomé to try to make the art show a bit easier. It definitely worked, but more to come with that in a later post.  Another benefit of using Artomé is that it's also a fundraiser. That aspect became a bit of a conundrum. My yearly budget, though it ..read more