A Wee Bit Delayed

Texture Turtle Art

January always seems to get ahead of me. While I'm able to keep up with the high priority, absolutely must get done things; the still important but not especially time sensitive things always seem to back up. Blog posting for instance.

Now I do have perfectly reasonable justifications for the tardiness of posting about last weeks lessons not least of which is the addition of three more lessons a week than  was teaching last term. The extra lessons while planned for are taking extra time. In addition I am also in the frantic planning stages of a birthday party set to take place at the end of the month.

So I'm playing catch-up which means that I'll be posting twice in the same day to get back on track. I could just include everything in one post but that's a lot of art for one post. Up top You can see the Texture Rubbing Turtle paintings from last Monday and Tuesday.

Below you can look at the Sky Colour Paintings and drawings created on Thursday. I especially love the drawn self portraits my young artists created to attach onto their paintings.

My special teaching assistant's piece 

Faces and Colour

Keeping with the oil resist theme of the beginning of this term I had my Painting and Drawing class use oil pastels to draw abstracted faces that were broken up into different planes and then patterned with colours and repeating lines, dots and other shapes. I then had them use watercolour paint to fill their drawing with blocks of colour. We used the art of Sandra Silberzweig as inspiration for our projects and talked about the elements of Sandra's portraits before we got started. There were some very good observations made about symmetry and asymmetry, use of colour and  pattern and shapes.

In this class I have a lot of returning students and the age and skill levels are in the same range as last term. From the five year olds to the 9 year olds there is a rainbow of different painting styles and techniques. It's a great class and I'm looking forward to the term with them.

Now I'm getting geared up for Painting and Drawing class #2 on Saturday. I haven't decided if I'll do the same lesson or do What I've planned for Arts Enrichment and teach from opposite ends of the lesson plan. I'll share with you when I post about it.

New Year New Lesson Plans

Welcome to 2016! I hope your holidays were lovely however you chose to spend them.  Mine were a bit of a whirlwind combined with a good dose of decompression. I spent one really lovely day alone at Artspace making more ink from dried out markers and cutting down and organizing the painted paper stack. We are ready for a term full of collages and intermittent ink washes.

School is back in session and so is Winter Term at Artspace.

This term I've planned ArtSparks and Arts Enrichment lessons that will focus more on fine motor skills in tandem with art exploration. Because I've got two classes of Arts Enrichment (and a possible second class for ArtSparks if registration picks up).

I've planned a single lesson plan for the classes but instead of repeating the same lesson twice each week I'm going to try teaching from both ends of my lesson plan. What this means is that the first lesson of the term for my Tuesday class will be the last lesson of the term for my Thursday class. There will be a lesson that overlaps in the middle of the term but 99% of the lessons for each week will not be repeaters. If there wasn't a student that is registered for both days I wouldn't bother but I have one of those and I want that student to be engaged with the lesson for both classes.

As an added challenge one of my Enrichment students is accompanying a sibling to an artsparks lesson which means that I'll be working towards making sure that they aren't doubling up on the same lesson each week too.

The first lesson of the term was an exploration in tracing, texture rubbings and painting. Here are a few examples.

How are your lesson plans shaping up?

Owls and Fire Flies

This week we focused on monochromatic art in Art Exploration. Using oil pastel and watercolours we brushed orange onto yellow orange oil pastel and turquoise over top of blue oil pastel to create a yarn wall for a small owl to make a new scarf. We read Little Owl's New Scarf to get inspiration.

Little Owl in the wool shop. Oil Pastel, tempera paint
and pre-cut construction paper owl shapes 

Arts Enrichment and Art Sparks have been painting using sponge rollers, pom poms and pencil grips to create an early evening sky with glowing fire flies inspired by The Brightest Star.

Tempera paint on mixed media paper with sequins

I have a Pro-D camp on Friday which is now consuming all my planning time. I want to do something different and have had no luck with my test projects. I have visions of my idea hanging in the windows at Artspace for the holidays.... I do have a backup in case inspiration fails but fingers crossed.

I also have a birthday party to prep for this weekend. A mixed media under the sea themed project is simmering in my head.....

Busy busy busy