and off we go!

Nothing like getting your classroom nice and clean and then starting off the year with a collage project! Genius, I say;)
Below are a few pics of the classroom before the kids came through.

Quote on the left- "To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong." 

Love it.

I'm color coding the tables this year and releasing students whose tables are clean and quiet by simply showing them a card with the table's color on it. One of the ways I'm aiming to manage with non verbal cues.

Some "new" posters. I really like the Grant Wood one at the top.

Hand signals for a few common classroom issues. 

Students rotate to me during the school year for two weeks and then they are off to another instructor for the next two weeks. Kathi, the other art instructor, does not meet with classes the first week of school, so I do mini lessons with as many classes as I can that/this first week. This year I will see all the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade classes for 30 minutes each. This is a great opportunity to go over the classroom rules and to get the kids back in the swing of things. It's difficult to do a project in 20 minutes, so I have them work on a large collaborative project.

Last year I did a project inspired by a few pieces by the artist Lee Gainer (which has brought a bunch of traffic to the blog:). I decided to do another collage this year, as it allows me to use a bunch of leftover paper from the past year.

I found a quilt done by Carol at the blog mamacjt and loved the bold colors, the repetition of round shapes, and how the composition was jam packed. I also thought it was cool that her quilt had so many round shapes, since most of the quilts I have shared with the students use mostly squares, rectangles, and triangles. Her quilt was, in turn, inspired by a painting done by Georgia Gray.

the quilt.

the painting.

So, the kids are building a collage inspired by a quilt inspired by a painting.

It's a pretty simple activity. Students start our with 3 sheets of paper- big, medium, and small. They fold each once or twice and then cut out round shapes from those sheets. Once their shapes are cut out, they glue them together, and then onto the big (24x36") sheet at their table. I emphasize, especially for the classes that came after the first one, that they should think about the best places for their shapes. I ask them to respond to the composition as it fills up. Once the sheets are pretty full (about 3 classes) I ask the next group to draw round shapes around their cut paper "targets". Students then fill in the spaces that are left in between the white ringed targets. 

It took 5 classes to complete the collages in the images below. I figure to have at least 12 more by the end of class on Friday. I will hang them in the back of our auditorium when they are finished to serve as a beginning of the year temporary public art project.

The kids are having a bunch of fun with it. Not a lot of stress in the project since they are adding onto something already started and others are wrapping it up behind them. I think the overall effect will be pretty darn interesting too:)