Youth Art Month

Although Youth Art Month is not until March, our State show was moved to an earlier date, sending our Regional show into February. It works well for me, as the old date used to overlap my daughter's birthday which made it hard to be a good mom and a good art teacher. Here are some pictures of my students' work hung in the Regional show which is held at the WITC in New Richmond through the 19th of this month. 

I decided to give the kids a personal award to recognize their achievement as well. A colleague gave me boxes and boxes of old gift certificate holders that I'll be using to present these awards to the students. I personalized each artist's award with their chosen artwork, name, and grade. I plan on printing the YAM logo onto oval shipping labels and putting them on the outside of the gift certificate holders for added pizzazz. 

Stay tuned! For YAM you can look forward to a week of "drawing challenges" which I plan on sending home with kids over spring break and three weeks of "mystery artists" for the weeks we are in school.

Youth Art Month

Happy Youth Art Month!

I decided to forgo my usual regional show this year as I hadn't save much work from the year and am a bit stressed out about our upcoming art show. Instead, we are celebrating in-house. And I have never seen such excitement among the students! I meant to post this last week so all of you can use it as a resource if you'd like, but it's not too late you still can do it! We have our Spring Break the third week of March, so I only have three weeks set up anyway. 

Mystery Artist:

I created three quick (about 40 seconds) iMovies about one artist for each movie. We are playing them on our Monday student news show each week. I have a box for students to submit their guess of who the artist is. I am randomly picking one winner from the stack of correct answers to win a prize. I just picked up some art pads at Wal-Mart. They were only $2.00 each, so it didn't break the bank to get six (one for each week (minus Spring Break) for both of my two schools). I kept the movies to artists that I have taught at more than one grade level throughout the last several years. My kindergarten colleagues also helped out this week by making "Camille and the Sunflowers" their storytime book. They said it was fun to hear a lot of gasps when they got to the part that showed the painting and the kids recognized it from the video! Here are my three videos: 

Now, I'm assuming that because I used pretty standard artists and most/all of you are art education professionals you know the answers. If you don't, feel free to ask in the comments or send me an email. I didn't want to put them below the videos in case someone wants to show the video straight from this blog.  

Spring Break Drawing Challenge

Due to Spring Break consistently being in the middle of YAM, I decided to jump on The Art of Ed's idea of a drawing challenge over break. (on a side note, if you don't get their emails, you should!) I created my own drawing ideas, though. Here is a copy of my full challenge, I haven't determined the prize for this yet, but I did create a certificate for all the kids that participate using a template on Word. (Note, I linked to the certificate on Google Docs, but it changed the font I used, so it's a bit odd. I have it set for everyone to be able to edit it if you want to edit it and download your own version). I had them printed on goldenrod paper to make them feel extremely important for the kids. I will also have everyone that receives a certificate put their name in a box for a prize. I might use the freebies from the conferences I've attended and make a little bag of art goodies.