Math & Art: It adds up to fun!

Students in Kindergarten used clay to create 2D shapes as part of their math curriculum, and the 1st and 2nd graders used Tux Paint stamps to create 10 sets of 10 in order to celebrate the 100th day of the school year. (See video below)

Kindergarten Lizards

Kindergartners used oil pastels to create lizard designs. Many of the students are in the pre-schematic level and the lizard fits into the tadpole schema fairly well.

Tissue Paper ala Keith Haring

Students in 1st and 2nd grades looked at a few of Keith Haring's stick figures and drew a stick figure in white pencil on black construction paper. They used tissue squares wrapped around the bottom of pencils and glued them to their stick figure drawing. After the initial application of tissue, students chose a second color to outline the figure.

Andy Warhol Revisited - Jr. High Digital Graphics

7th and 8th graders in my Digital Graphics class visited the Andy Warhol Interactive website in order to explore variations in hue and saturation which were our two most recent vocabulary words. After getting a sense of what could be done using Marilyn Monroe as a subject, students learned how to resize and duplicate layers in Gimp and then explore the Hue/Saturation feature to recolorize their school pictures. A few who finished early got to do the same thing for a cartoon character. These students are learning many of the tools and features of Gimp in doing this project. (See Prezi below)

5th & 6th Gr. 1 Pt. Perspective

Teaching one point perspective is always fun and doing names gives the students a way to do what young teens do anyway, focus on themselves. They learn precision, logic, measuring and craftsmanship along the way and end up with a very nice graphic piece. (See video below)

Let's Make Some Bling; a Gimp Tutorial

Although we couldn't afford Photoshop, I felt that students needed to learn digital graphic skills so I adapted a fun project using the open source program Gimp. I had done this with Ginger Baron's students at Lowell School and ACE students at Prep, so I knew it was a successful activity. By the time it was finished, kids knew a lot about graphic tools. (See video below)

Digital Art Elective: Web 2.0 - Wordles

Classes switched after our break and a new batch of students just started my first hour Digital Art/Yearbook class. Web 2.0 tools figure into graphic design work so we spent a little time exploring the Wordle link on my Portaportal. Objectives included 1) Listing favorites using WORD; copy & paste text into WORDLE 2) Exploring fonts 3) Exploring the layouts and 4) Using the edit custom palette feature. (See video below)

Intro to Paper Mache' Animals using Prezi

When I was teaching at Holy Family in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, I used the Milwaukee Beasties as inspiration for a paper mache' project. We created designer teddy bears. For Herrera Elementary in Phoenix I decided that we would create four-legged beasts. I introduced the whole project using this Prezi. Paper Mache' Animals on Prezi (See Prezi below)

Intro to Block Printing via Prezi

I used to use PowerPoint to create all the presentations for my classroom. Then I discovered Prezi and I switched over for some of the concepts I needed to introduce to students. (See Prezi below)

Tessellation Exploration

Using an old demo copy of Tom Snyder's Tessellation Exploration, fourth graders work on slide tessellations. They learned how to use the Window 7's snipping tool to capture their screens and then save them to my 4th grade folder. Many technical skills were involved but in addition, a collaborative environment evolved where the students helped each other using the various software and tools. Here are the screens that were saved. (See video below)