What a Hoot!

Oh, the fun a group of kindergarteners can have with toilet paper tubes, feathers, glue and construction paper.  A little cutting, a little folding, a little gluing, and there you have it.

What a Hoot!!

Let's get a little personal...

A little more about me:

I AM A TEACHER.  I have been an art teacher since 1993.  I taught in a small Wisconsin school district for 12 years before beginning a new adventure- leaving it all behind for Alaska.  I've been back and forth between Alaska and Wisconsin a few times now.  I currently am back in Alaska, living in a town that has no Art program, and so I teach Art on a volunteer basis in my daughter's kindergarten class.  Our family is currently preparing to move back to Wisconsin one more time, and so I am also job hunting.  In preparing to be back in the artroom once again, I have become a member of the National Art Education Association as well as the Wisconsin Art Education Association.  I am excited at the prospect of connecting with other art educators as well as possibly taking on a board position with WAEA.  I also recently found The Art of Education- a great online community for Art Educators.

I AM A MOM.  I have a small brood of art producing, creative playing, book reading, snack eating, mess making children.  They are imaginative, creative, and love taking part in anything I'm doing- crafting, cooking, reading, or anything else.  One of my favorite places to find ideas for them is Pinterest.  I have found sewing projects, craft recipes, fun (and sometimes actually healthy) snacks and decorating ideas here, all to make my kids smile and feed my own creative soul.

I AM A CREATOR.  Among my many hobbies are sewing, painting, scrapbooking, basket-making, gardening, baking, decorating, and now I'm learning to crochet as well.  I need to have a project going- always.  Here are a few of my latest projects:

Denim storage bin. I got the material at the local thrift store- the denim was free! I found the pattern here. I can see making lots and lots of these for holding random things in a super cute, affordable and earth-friendly kind of way.

This is my first crochet project. There is definitely room for improvement, but to a 3 year old... it was beautiful! I bought the pattern here.

I took a cookie decorating class recently. I learned about royal icing, marbling and flooding, among other things. Considering I got a box of 101 cookie cutters as a Christmas gift, and the cookie decorating was really fun, I will do more!! Some of my teacher's recommended favorite cookie sites are here and here and here.

This is a birdhouse I decorated as part of a fundraiser. I bought a plain wooden birdhouse and then could decorate it any way I liked. The original birdhouse was shaped a little differently than I had anticipated, so I struggled a bit, but it's not too far off of my original vision. My favorite part is the butterfly. All the proceeds go to the local emergency shelter. Prizes were awarded for the top money earning birdhouses, and mine won first prize!  Then it was auctioned off and brought in an additional $80.  Sweet!!

These are just a few of my personal interests...

Happy Birthday, Dear Peter!

Febuary was Black History Month.  In honor of the 50th birthday of Ezra Jack Keats' The Snowy Day, the first children's book featuring an African-American protagonist, we created our own snowy days.  Now, in the interest of full disclosure, this lesson was planned for February, but a number of different circumstances prevented that, and we actually did the project in early March.  However, since we have snow around here until May, it will still be "a snowy day" for a long while!

I have always loved the illustrations in this book, particularly the snow.  I love Keats' use of color in the snow and the stamped/printed snowflakes in all sorts of pastel colors.  So simple and beautiful- yet encourages children to think about color in a new way and starts them on the path of realizing they can use more than the realistic or expected color when creating art.  The question is how can I get kinders to get that same look?

First, we tore our paper for snow.  I think hand torn paper gives a great look to a project and honestly for kindergarteners, it's great exercise for fine motor control.  We then used peeled crayons in the colors that Keats used in the snow- blues, pinks and purples- and used the side of the crayon to color the snow.  The white still shows through, but there is color there too.  I think this could be a good place for pastels too, but sometimes little ones get too heavy handed with those, and then there will be NO white left showing!  The white paper is then glued onto a blue rectangle, making sure to match corners.  The kids can then turn their paper either horizontally or vertically, depending on how steep they wanted their sledding hill to be.  Not surprisingly, most boys went for the steepest hill possible!!  They they glued on the body to look like it was sliding down the hill.  The bodies were precut shapes that looked like little Peter in his red snowsuit.  To personalize them, I took their pictures with the digital camera, cropped and sized them, and cut them to fit in the snowsuit, as though it was their face in there with their hood pulled up.  Lastly they decorated with punched snowflakes- again in all the colors that Keats used.

I think they turned out really sweet.  The kids needed encouragement to color dark enough with the crayon on the snow to see it, and to add lots of snowflakes, but they certainly had fun on their snowy, sledding adventures.  Happy Birthday, Peter!!

Creating the texture and color on the snow.                    Paper punched snowflakes.     

Weeeee!!!                                                      Some of our finished work.