Minions and More Minions!

The Minion Challenge required that students create a 3D creature based on the movie "Despicable Me." I had done this with students at Lowell on the Teen Grid and it was a great way to show spatial reasoning and a mastery of building with the prims. (primitive shapes) They learn to move object on an X, Y, and Z axis. (See video below)

Shape and Form: The SMART Way!

Students in Mr. Ortega's 1st and 2nd grade class participated during the demo portion of today's lesson about shape and form which was presented on the SMART Board. After that, each of the students went to laptops in the art room where they used the interactive notebook files to test themselves by sorting the forms from the shapes. It does tend to get a bit noisy when learning is going on! (see noisy video below)

Intro to Tux Paint

Normally this class is too large to use the 18 computers I have in my art room. Today I got to take 1st and 2nd graders separately so all students got to explore the program Tux Paint. It is an open source (Free!!) piece of software and is comparable to the old Kid Pix in many ways. Students should always have at least two class periods for pure exploration before moving towards what most people call projects. This is true of most mediums even software. (See video below)

My New Art Room @ Herrera School

This was the first time I had a proper sink in my art room! I had more storage space than I'd ever had before. Ok, the tables were wobbly, but you can't have everything. It was a pretty great way to start my new job at Herrera Elementary. I begged for laptops and I made sure I got some. It was also the first time I had a SMART Board and it was amazing. I always had an overhead projector and at Holy Family I had a computer projector, so this was really state of the art equipment. (see Animoto below)