Art and creativity in teaching!

February 12, 2018

Art and creativity in teaching!

In 2018 I am teaching Art as a Casual Relief Teacher (CRT). I am enjoying being in the Art room, getting creative and thinking of unique and fun ways to engage the students and teach the curriculum.

The day the crayons quit is a popular book in the Art room. I've read it a million times making silly voices for all the different crayons. Here's an idea I am yet to use for a text connected piece of art. Students usually have a favourite colour and can relate their experience to something they like that is that colour. This requires scissor skills as there is some cutting, basic drawing skills and being able to glue, the text part of it would be suitable for Grade 1 or 2 upward I think. (By the way my favourite colour is actually green but pink was the first paper I grabbed! :)).

Warm and cool colours - the Preps are learning about warm and cool colours so I used the weather to remind them of the warm and cool colours. It worked really well as the sun is warm and the cloudy days are cool. I pre-folded an A3 piece of 110gsm cartridge and wrote their grade on it to prepare the class. Then I set up warm palettes on one side of the room and cool palettes on the other side so they couldn't get mixed up. After discussing warm and cool colours on the floor, I asked them to draw a circle on one side of their paper and a puffy cloud on the other side (some Prep students said "I can't draw a cloud" but the best part I said is you can't get a cloud "wrong" as they are all different shapes - this gave them the confidence to have a go). They chose a side to do first. If they chose their circle (sun) they sat near the warm colour palettes and if they chose their cloud they sat near the cool colour palettes. Once the majority of students were finished one side I got them to switch over. They had fun doing the changeover and enjoyed adding details in all the colours on the palettes!

Here are some of the creative things I have created for my teaching as both an Art teacher and Classroom teacher! I found that children really responded to my drawings in the classroom and to my creative ideas in the Art room.

I drew this little character named Yard Judy - I laminated her and put her up on the board to let the students know when I had yard duty.

Drawing with Pro-bots! Why draw when you can code a car to do it for you? :)

These are some drawings I did for my teacher's example 1800's journal for Grade 4, firstly the cover with ship sketch (the students all made these in class), the frontispiece was a coloured pencil and ink portrait of my character (made to look like a sepia photograph) and I drew an annotated character profile and a precious object in pencil.

Hand-drawn Best and Fairest rosettes that I created for our Grade 4 Rounders Tournament in 2017.

The logo I designed for our Grade 4 Rounder's League last year.

Here's a Rounders Trophy I made from an old foam cricket bat, cut down and shaped, painted gold and glitter applied. The final touch was attaching it to a piece of wood and staining it to create a nice base.

For Chinese New Year we created a hall display with my hand drawn/painted Tin Tin and Snowy in a Chinese vase, I also made brown paper Chinese shelving and in class we made Chinese plates with our zodiacs on them. The hall looked amazing!

When creating our own newspapers (Grade 4) in response to a text I drew this example of a Twit's themed newspaper on the whiteboard.

3D effect hand drawing - I did this with my Grade 4 class as a fun activity and to improve their ability to use a ruler!

Art classes teaching jog-e drawings and seascapes (Grade 5/6). I drew this Hokusai wave on the board and left it there for two different classes that I ran. The third pic is the Japanese joge-e drawings example. Some of the Grade 6 students despite saying they "hated art" loved doing this and they even asked to put their work up on the board at the end of the class for their teacher to see when she returned. I wish I took some pics of their work - they were amazing!

Olympic Games poster that I created for Grade Prep/One Rich Learning Project on the Olympic Games 2016.

Olympic Medal Tallyboard that I created for Grade Prep/One class for their Rich Learning Project on the Olympic Games 2016.

Pig Puppet - text response activity Grade One. I made this cut out template for the class to create their own pig puppets in response to the Three Little Pigs. Here is my completed puppet that I made to model the finalised piece. Very simple but they enjoyed it and came up with some gorgeous designs.

Grade 2 annotated character drawings Ratburger by David Walliams - Burt.

This character was created with suggestions from the whole class. I drew as they suggested, it was very fast paced and fun. I think they wanted to test my drawing skills!

Whatever book we were reading or activty we were doing I always created a bit of excitement just by sketching the main character or idea on the whiteboard...