Bolivia Arts Selected as a Top Teacher Blog!!!

I was just informed that I was selected as a Top Art Teacher Blog in the South Region! Very exciting! Check out some of the other award winners art blogs below.

Teacher Salary Info

• Snippety Gibbet
• Art With Miss Rachel
• Art With Mr. E
• Ms. Art Teacher
• Texas Art Teacher
• Elementary Art Fun
• St. Martha Catholic School Artists
• Tishalou
  
• Miz Patti's Art Room
  
• Art At Herod<
• Art and the First Year Teacher
  
• MNPS Chiuly Art Lessons
• Art Gallery
  
• The Small Art Teacher Blog
  
• WKE Art Smarts
  
• Elementary Artist
  
• Abbotts Hill Art Studio
  
• Art Talk from Mrs. Woodlief
  
• Art at WHS
  
• Lake Hamilton Art
  
• Riverwood AP Studio Art
  

Grants!!!

I'm super excited to have been awarded two grants from the Brunswick Arts Council!!

Grant #1 will pay for me to take a ceramics course at Fat Cat Pottery in Wilmington, NC. Ceramics has been the one discipline I never managed to get much experience with. While I think I did alright teaching myself some basics last year, this class will definitely help me expand on my skills!

Grant #2 will fund travel to the National Art Education Association (NAEA) National Convention in Seattle, WA this spring. The convention is a four day professional development event for art educators from across the country. Each day is filled with workshops, lectures, and hands-on projects. I am very excited to be attending once again for the second year!


Thanks so much to the Brunswick Arts Council for making these opportunities possible!

Legal Music for Videos

Creative Commons links to music you can legally use in your classroom and use with videos. Check it out!

Student work featured in "Inkblots" film

We were lucky enough to have an animation student at SCAD, Ryan Coster, visit us this past spring. He was looking for student artwork to use in a film project he was working on. A handful of fourth grade's mythological creatures and 3rd grade's animal combinations from last year ended up working perfectly. Click here to check out Bolivia students' awesome artwork in the trailer for Inkblots (about 37 seconds in).

After finishing his animations for the movie, Ryan came back in to Bolivia to show students how the final film came out and to tell us about life as an animator! We also did some quick animation magic, which you can watch below. Thanks again to Ryan for coming in and making all of this happen!

Artist Portraits

Fourth grade did a large portrait unit that included shrinky-dink self-portrait pins, bobble head caricatures (which I'll post) and artist portraits. They selected an artist whose work they really liked and after learning some sketching/proportion basics, created some really awesome portraits! Their task for their backgrounds was to represent their artist's style in some way. 

Jasper Johns

Salvidor Dali

Janet Fish

Vincent Van Gogh

Chuck Close

Frida Kahlo

Wayne Thiebaud

Summer Catch Up

Alright! With the school year right around the corner, I think it's time to get back in the habit of updating this thing regularly. Lots of cool stuff to catch up on from the end of last year but first, here's some of what I got to see while up in NY for the summer.

Tim Hawkinson - I was really glad I got to see this; he's definitely one of my favorite artists. He makes these very complex mechanical pieces using all different kinds of materials. This show was called One Man Band. In it, he set up an installation of several of his contraptions. When someone walked up to one of them, it was triggered to make some type of repetitive noise (motion sensor, I think). The  white stringy thing hanging from the ceiling (above) is dripping water into buckets with tin pans in them. The show became fun when several people entered the gallery a few minutes after me... a very odd sort of melody started to emerge.

Here's another one with a coleman water cooler with screws all around  the outside. It spins and plucks the metal strips... kind of like a music box I guess.

I love stumbling on awesome stuff in Chelsea. I need to find what I did with my notebook to look up the artist's name. The pictures definitely don't do this one justice.

detail

Another good one. Planning on using her for a lesson but I need to find her name first. I'll update this when I do.

another...

Then there's Picasso at the Met. 

Walking through the sculpture garden.

Second graders should be able to tell me about these :)

Chuck Close 

Damien Hirst  (insert jaws music)

And to finish off the post, here are some classics that my students should know! Extra credit maybe? :)

Contest Winners

We've had several Bolivia Artists win contests recently and I just wanted to spotlight some of their success! First off, congratulations to the winners of the Bolivia T-shirt design contest - 1st Place: Shanaedoah S. and Sabrina F., 2nd: Meredith W., 3rd: Garret E., Honorable Mention: Ahoyoka S., Hailey C., Madison W., and Onzel B. Way to go everyone!!

Congratulations also goes out, once again, to Sabrina F., who created the winning entry to Brunswick County's annual poster contest. The theme this year was "The Power of Play." Check out Sabrina's amazing work!!

Flip Books

After being introduced to animation through Keith Haring's flip books and Walt Disney animation studios, third graders then created their own flip book animations. I think the results are aaaamazing! :) Check out what Mrs. Floyd's class came up with.

Adinkra Prints

Second graders studied the Adinkra printmaking process of the Ashanti in Ghana, Africa. We learned about the symbolism and  function of Adinkra cloth, and then created our own symbols / stamps for the prints. We also got to explore a giant traveling map of Africa on loan from National Geographic at the end of the lesson.

Students' stamps with Adinkra symbols

The Story of Love and Peace - Priscilla

The Sun Shine - Daniel

The Life of Print - Kamryn

Story Quilts

After reading Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold, first graders created their own story quilts about an experience they had (either real or imagined). At first, students created a small watercolor painting and used patterned paper to collage their borders. As the project continued, a student asked if they could make an actual uilt. I thought why not, and decided to use burlap for students to transfer their images onto. First graders seemed to really enjoy this project. They had some lively sewing circles going on and they did a really great job of helping each other out with the sewing. At the very least, they got a lot of practice tying knots!

My House by Alexis

My House. My house is a rainbow. The tree is brown and green. I love my house because I like my tree. I played when I was little.

The Taj Mahal by Serena

This is me and the Taj Mahal. It's beautiful here! The Taj Mahal is white. I used to go there when I was little. The Taj Mahal was built long, long ago. The Taj Mahal is the tallest building in India.

Paul's awesome presentation of Leaving the Atmosphere. Too cute.

Some Updates and Some Mexican Suns

Really looking forward to getting back on track with posting much more frequently now that the yearbook is finally finished and submitted!! Here's a few cool things coming up: I'm very excited to be attending the NAEA National Convention in Baltimore in a few weeks... I expect to have lots of great stuff to report back from that. After we get back from break, 5th grade is going to be starting a collaborative project with students at a school in Oaxaca, Mexico where a friend of mine is currently teaching art. We'll be setting up ongoing skype video chats for our classes as the project continues. Stay tuned...








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In the meantime, check out these AWESOME Mexican suns by 3rd graders! While working on this project, we learned about soo many art ideas: contrast, variety, mixing warm and cool colors (just to name a few). We had a lot of fun making these suns and I was especially impressed with how much personality students put into them. Enjoy!

*Credit: lesson was adapted from this one by paintedpaper.

Ode to Food

This post is a bit late as this lesson is from a few months back when all the Thanksgiving / holiday cooking was going on. Second graders were introduced to Pop art, looking specifically at Andy Warhol and Wayne Thiebaud. They learned that art could be about everyday objects like food. They then chose their own favorite foods and drew them using oil pastels to blend and mix their colors. Students finished the lesson by writing an ode to celebrate their food and then read their poems aloud to the class. We had a lot of fun with this one and it certainly made us all very hungry! Enjoy!

Listen to Amber's poem: Chocolate Cake

Dustin's Cake and Ice Cream

Conley's Pizza

Listen to Bryce's poem: The Tall Cake



Listen to Madeline's poem: Turkey!



Listen to Hannah's poem: Apples

Aztec Mosaics

Third graders learned about Aztec culture by examining their art and architecture. After viewing many different types of mosaics, students selected an aztec symbol and started planning out their own mosaic. They had to select their color palette, make choices about how to fill their symbols, and design patterns for their backgrounds. After much hard work their finished mosaics look great!!!