First blog post!

Hello virtual world!

I can't tell you how excited I am to start this blog. When I started teaching K-5 visual art last year I would surf around the web and read amazing art ed blogs and think to myself, "I could never do that!" These sites would look so polished, the projects looked so wonderful, the teacher bloggers would sound so experienced! Here I was trolling the web trying to piece together a curriculum from scratch a month before school was starting!

One year later I'm happy to say that I am on that blogging train! I intend to use this blog as a way to share my classes' projects, reflect on my teaching practice, and connect to other teachers, parents, and art enthusiasts!

So for my first project I'll share an artwork from a 1st grader named Kyah. We read an Aesop's Fable, "The Bear and Bees" illustrated by Charles Santore.

I used the book Drawing with Children by Mona Brookes and her "Monart" method to guide the students in their drawings of the bear. I really like how she teaches you to break down shape to the 5 basic elements. This is easy for a 1st grader to digest. 

I had the kids draw in pencil first, outline in sharpie fine tip markers, erase their pencil lines, and color their art with water color crayons. I demonstrated the use of the crayons for them. It blew their minds when they saw how the dry "crayon" turned to paint! They kept saying, " It looks so realistic!!"

Here is Kyah's version of the bear and the bee. I like how she gave the bear's claws purple nail polish! Those bees look aggressive in their movement! She isn't quite finished with brushing the water over the colors yet, but you can see she is doing a nice job filling in the appropriate shapes with her intended color.

Ok...I'm going to sign off for now! Thanks!