Fall Term Begins

I am an artist. I teach art to children aged 2 up to tweens (and older if the opportunity arises).  I have a bachelors degree in photography and I create things in one form or another most days. As of tomorrow I'm starting my third year of teaching at Artspace Children's Art Centre a unique arts centre that offers inspiring visual and performing arts programs for children aged 2 to 13 in the lower mainland of British Columbia.

This year I'm doubling my teaching schedule. In addition to painting and drawing for school aged children and art exploration classes for toddlers and preschoolers I'll be teaching the visual arts section for the two combination visual arts, music and movement classes for toddlers and preschoolers. I'll be adapting some of my previous and current lessons for these classes.

I used to blog frequently up until a few years ago when the demands of a new baby with a child beginning school took away a lot of my blogging time.

Then came the teaching gig at Artspace and instead of blogging I was teaching myself how to create a good lesson plan with enough flexibility to add or remove steps and still have a creative and fun class for the little people in my classes. I would love to say that I have got that all down pat, that I can plan in my sleep and that walking into the art studio that will soon fill with small faces with and without their faces is a breeze; but I'm kind of glad that it isn't the case. I say this because the nervousness and anxiety is a big part of the process. I use that uncomfortableness to prod me to really research for inspiration and then create some really great lessons. Like the ones pictured here.

Like a lot of art educators I peruse the art lesson plans pinned on Pinterest to get inspired. For the first few terms (and I'll be honest here) even now I like to glean ideas for lessons from the Internet. In fact I plan my lesson plans on Pinterest boards so that I have a visual reminder of what I have planned for each lesson. More often than not I end up changing my lessons at the last minute because I've seen something that has excited me. Over the course of the last three years I've created some pretty awesome lesson plans. The best ones have all had a specific artist as a jumping off point instead of another instructor's lesson. Again as an example, the images I've posted here were lessons I created after looking at the drawings of UK artist Antony Gormley. The anatomy themed project perhaps more directly so than the map but both projects make use of the same process and both lessons elicited a very satisfying chorus of ohhhhhs  during the lesson.

These classes use a wet on wet painting method that allows the paint to flow only where the paper has been previously wet with a brush. In the anatomy painting the figure was lightly drawn then painted over with water. I had my students drop black alcohol ink into the wet areas; the ink flowed only where the paper was wet. The same technique was used with the maps, the water areas on the globe were filled with a good layer of water and blue ink was dropped into those ares. a second wash of water was added for the brown outer areas.

The reason I'm posting about this technique here today is that my first lesson tomorrow is going to make use of it. The two lessons shown above were done with grade 5 and 6 students and were quite involved lessons. Tomorrow's lesson is a thirty minute class with toddlers and their parents and caregivers. I'll be reading A Leaf Can Be by Laura Salas and illustrated by Violeta Dabja.

With preschool and toddler's I always start my lesson off with a picture book. Sometimes the lesson will be based on the illustrations and sometimes the book is used to get my little artists thinking about their subject for the day. While Violeta Dabj'a illustrations are simply beautiful; tomorrow's lesson uses her beautiful work as a glancing jumping point. I'll post a more thorough description of tomorrow's lesson which will include a variation of the wet into wet technique as well as sponge painting and tissue paper collage; all combined to create some tree art with fall foliage.

The plan is to post the lessons I've taught to my students here with the book I'm using for each class and the artist or art teacher who inspired the lesson. I've got a goal to have all my lessons created by myself rather than borrowed from another lesson I've seen. There are some amazing art teachers out there who are happy to share their lesson plan ideas. I want to be one of them.