Some art to brighten up your dreary winter January days...

I have 2 different teaching degrees.  I am sometimes an art teacher and I sometimes teach elementary classroom.  

When I was in Germany, I was the art teacher for grades K-5th.   Here are some examples of artwork that was entered in a contest.   Several pieces of artwork were chosen to be printed in a publication of student art work.   One of my favorite ones is the owl.   I just love the expression on the face... and it was made by a kindergarten student!   The white things?  Eggs.  The owl is guarding the eggs.

We studied owls in art class- their body shapes, looked at different types in photographs and I even found recordings of various owls.   They especially loved hearing the owls!   The portrait on the top far left?  That's from the face drawing lesson that I did every year with my fourth graders.  I select 4th grade-- because, without any further instruction or strong natural talent-- most adults stay at the fourth grade level of people drawing ability.   So, I teach them facial placements, shading, and how to draw 'realistic' human faces.  It's probably one of the most profound differences that you'll see in children's art work- because, I always have them draw a 'face without any instruction' before I start the lessons.   So, not only do they do such an amazing realistic face-- but... I also teach them how to use and shade with pastels!  

Looking for signs of SPRING....

It's been raining a lot lately... and we finally had a sunshine-y day on Friday.  I took my second grade students out to the playground area, armed with magnifying glasses, so that they could look for 'signs of spring.'

A tree just beginning to show 'buds'....  Sorry it's so white-- I took a photo right into the sun! 

The sun was shining too bright... but, one of the tulip leaves had pushed through the decorative bark when it was growing and it still had it on the tip of the leaf and the kids loved that little detail.

They loved the tiny little blue flowers and the magnifying glass came in handy.

This tree had lots of 'flowers' on it and it was a great example to show the children that 'not' all flowers look like typical flowers.

The green fence is the end of the playground property and the base property is just past the fence.  We have a lovely view of an old Italian church and the snow on the Italian Alps... or the Dolomite Mountains.

Some more flowering tree buds.  Huge playground area... but, they aren't able to play in this area, for now, because it's just too muddy from all the rain.  However our school has tons of playground equiptment for the students to play on.

I'm sure that once these trees fill out with their summer leaves that we won't have such a pretty view of the mountains?

Lots of snow on the mountains because when we get rain... the mountains get snow.

Feeling the need to recycle some newspaper?

Make a mummy!

I started my Elementary art students on this project when we returned from Spring Break in April. It took them 6 weeks+ to complete the project. I think that they did a great job. However, it would have also been nice to have had the student's hard work acknowledged by someone at the school.