A Day in the Life: Start with Art!

So I'm going to attempt to post once a week about a day in the life of an art educator. Yup, a day in the shoes of me! An art educator - the best job in the world - okay, I may be biased.

Best thing of today were the countless hugs I received. The best one of all came from a darling 1st grader. He not only gave me a hug, but also jumped up and wrapped his legs around me. I was literally holding him up. So adorable. He was pretty much this excited:

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Anywho - early in the year, as in the first day we met in art class, my students and I made sketchbooks that we will be using throughout the year. The students could decorate their sketchbooks in any way that they liked. I encouraged them to at least draw their grade number on their sketchbook & then add whatever designs they wanted. Here are my lovely sketchbooks!

My K-6 Sketchbooks!

After we created sketchbooks, we worked on a mini-project for a PTA fundraiser and this past week we dove head first into our lessons! Kindergarten worked on Shapes, 1st grade is drawing self-portraits, 2nd is drawing self-portraits with a friend and so on.

What I am super excited about are the 5th and 6th grade contour line drawings! Actually, I'm in love with 5th & 6th grade, so anything they do is fabulous! In art, we're training the students to draw what they see, not what they know. So many times do you have students that draw a house that's just a square and a triangle roof, in reality there are no houses in this county that look like a square with a perfect triangle roof. So to help them learn how to do this, they have to turn off their LEFT LOGICAL brain and crank up that RIGHT CURVY & FUN side. They don't like it at all. Here are some blind contour drawings (aka you can't look at your paper, just the subject you are drawing) we've been working on this week in our sketchbooks! This improves eye-hand coordination and influences kids to draw what they see, including all those little details.

Student aren't allowed to look at their paper, but instead focus on the observation.

Students concentrating & working on getting a detailed drawing.

I love it when kids come to my class & are so very excited to learn. What's even more exciting is when I see them outside of class and they stop to say hello. If only I could learn all five thousand five hundred fifty of their names!

I know I will never have the same experiences I'm having already with the same students, so I'm trying to remember that there's no place like here.