A Thank You to 3B

We're coming to the end of the summer holidays and I'd just like to say thank you to all of the children and parents of 3B who have made this is a great first year at the school for me. I'm looking forward to my new challenge of moving up to year 4 with 4B and taking on the role of Art Coordinator.

I'd also just like to thank everyone for such lovely cards and gifts. They really mean a lot and I was incredibly humbled by everybody's kindness.

A huge thank you must also go to the group of parents who generously treated me with vouchers to a local art shop (Fielders, in Wimbledon). This was an incredibly generous and thoughtful gift and is hugely appreciated. I managed to get down to the shop over the holidays and thought I'd leave a picture here of some of the goodies that I purchased. Some of these have already been used for new classroom decorations!

Thank you once again and I wish everyone a fantastic new academic year.
DB.

New Year, New Classroom

Next academic year I will be moving from Year 3 into Year 4 which has involved moving all of my things upstairs to a new classroom. I saw it as a good opportunity to freshen things up a bit and try some new ideas. Many of the teacher blogs I follow often share their classrooms so I thought I'd join the club. Enjoy the pictures!

This is the inside of my classroom door. Hopefully it'll inspire the children a bit and they'll look forward to coming in every day. I saw a similar idea here.

This is the class looking in from the doorway. Our first unit in September will be "I Am Warrior" with a focus on the Romans so the table names are going to be Roman Gods. You can also see some "criminal words" at the back of the class that the children should try to avoid in their writing (such as 'said') and offers better alternatives. The literacy area focuses on VCOP (vocabulary, connectives, openers and punctuation) which will hopefully support their writing.

My new routine board has a clear visual timetable on one side and a list of monitors on the other. I'll work my way through each of the jobs in register order for easiness.

We're starting a new house system next year and this board will be used to count house-points. I laminated coloured paper for each house and used a permanent gold marker to write the names of the children in each house.

This sign is above the door and I'm sure I'll be referring to it at numerous times throughout the year. It's a very clear message and will support our new behaviour policy.

I used some really useful sticky hooks to hang some things in my classroom to provide extra storage. I keep my spare subject squares for my visual timetable in the basket and my chimes are used if the class are being too noisy for my liking.

Each child has their own tray like these with their name on. They can keep extra stationery, reading books etc in here. They're responsible for keeping it neat and tidy!

My "Word of the Week" board. I had thought about something like this last year but didn't get the time to make it. I've created about 40 word sheets, all laminated, with a new word/example etc so I'm fully prepared for this year. I've got laminated sections at the bottom of the board where students will be encouraged to have a go at using the word in a sentence. I might even throw in a little reward (like house-points) if a pupil can use the word that week in their writing.

Here's the reading corner. Admittedly, the shelves themselves need a bit of a tidy-up but they're on their way. You may also notice Oscar the bear and his "Oscar's Adventures" book. This book was created by my class last year. Each week, a different child would take Oscar home and record what activities they did and either draw or stick in a picture. It was very popular and I'm going to attempt to do a similar but more grown-up version of the task this year. The mini-easel is going to be used to display artwork that I've been really impressed by.

Boggle Board! I came across this idea here and thought it would fit my classroom well. The children use the letters displayed to try and make as many words as possible in that week and they record them on the boggle sheets kept in the basket (those handy hooks again!). I'll change the letters each week and hopefully this will become a really engaging, interactive display.

Bit untidy at the moment as I'm still replacing some of the older labels, but I'm lucky that I've got so much storage for these trays for all sorts of things. I've also got space now for all of my homework, maths homework and letters/books that need to be sent home.

I thought I'd create this folder to have a very clear record of times when homework is missing/forgotten. Each child has a sheet with their name on in the folder and they must record the date, title of homework and give a reason for why there homework was not handed in on time. Hopefully this will also encourage the students to understand responsibility. I came across this idea here.

I've got lots of Dr Seuss quotes stuck around the classroom .

This is my magnetic buddy Keith who hangs around on the filing cabinet. He's going to keep important things like my school teacher I.D., whistle and P.E. key safe and easily obtainable.

Here's a poem I found called "What is a teacher?" that I enjoyed reading. It's quite fun and I thought some of the children might like it. The other side has some of my favourite quotes about education.

These are my main shelves next to my desk. I've got my plans, key resources and daily trays here to stay organised. The top shelf has other important things like pens, spare glue lids, markers, sharpeners etc. It also has lots of coloured hand cutouts as I will occasionally send home a "High Five" to congratulate a child for a piece of work or improved behaviour.

Over to my desk, I've for the Brain, Buddy, Boss system to aid focus. There are also a couple of other Dr Seuss quotes and my Mr Brickwood train some friends got me to wish me luck for my first year of teaching.

Being the school's new art coordinator and leading the Art Club, there's going to be lots of mess in my classroom. I bought these brilliant table covers online and hopefully they'll last a good amount of time. It saves so much effort and time compared to laying out newspaper that gets destroyed. I went for a bit of a mixture with coloured pencils, cute owls, friendly cows and a couple of floral designs.

Here you can see my CREATE 3D letters that I feel brighten up the classroom and will hopefully further inspire and motivate the children to create not just in art but with their words, too. I used the same method as used in our art project.I tried making each letter something different to do with art. The C is inspired by Jackson Pollock's paint spattering, R is the rainbow colours, E has an optical illusion to show perspective and how art can take different forms, A takes some inspiration from Klimt with his swirls on The Tree of Life, T shows tints and gradients and the final E is inspired by Paul Klee. You can also see the whiteboards there that will be used for Literacy and Numeracy working walls.

 And here's the new Art Club display in one of the main hallways. I've sacrificed some space so unfortunately I can't squeeze as many pieces onto the board, but it looks much neater and with the hot-glued clothes pegs on, I can easily and quickly transfer new pieces of art without hassle.

So there you have it, that is my new classroom. I've put a lot of time into it and am very pleased with the final result. Let's hope the kids are, too...

DB.

Art Gallery

It's my first year at my current school and there hasn't been an art co-ordinator so I've stepped into the role informally over the past couple of months and will be taking it officially from September next school year.

I thought it would be a nice way to finish the year by having a mini celebration of artwork that had been taking place in my classroom. During lunchtime, many children and staff came in and browsed with enthusiasm which was lovely to see. After school, many parents of children in my art club came to look. It was great to have their support!

On display was all of the work from my art club over the past half-term, the 3D letters from the activity afternoons and some artwork that my usual class had completed. Although on a small scale, the exhibition was a great success. Hopefully in the future it can be more of a celebration of the whole school in the main hall.

Thanks to children, staff and parents who came along.

DB.

Art Activity Afternoon Project- 3D Letters

For the last 3 weeks of the year, children get to opt into a fun activity and each class is a mixture of years 3-6. I had about 24 in my art group and thought we'd attempt an ambitious project over the 3 1-hour sessions.

I came across this idea on this website. It has step-by-step instructions and a helpful video tutorial too if any of you want to attempt it at home over the holidays!

Each child could choose one letter (most went for their first initial) and over the 3 weeks we planned, created the structure and then finally decorated.
Here are some photos of the overall process:

These were so much fun and it was great to see some of the older children help those in younger year groups. These were a huge success and definitely attracted the most attention in the art gallery. I will definitely be doing these again next year for the art activity afternoons.

DB.

Art club project #5- Klimt Tree Scratch Art

This was our last project and it took a couple of hour sessions to complete. I came across this project on another great blog and wanted to give it a go. The first stage was to cover our paper with a huge range of colour and organic shapes using a wax crayon. When the page was filled with solid colour we painted over the page with black tempera paint with a few drops of washing up liquid (this helps the scratching process when it's dry).

We looked at Klimt's "Tree of Life" and used that as inspiration to create our own.

We learnt how to draw basic trees by first creating a 'Y' shape and practised these on scrap paper. We then did a rough drawing lightly on our home-made scratch paper and used a mixture of compasses/tooth-picks/skewers to scratch over the pencil. Some children had create difficulty getting their colour to shine through. This may have been because their layer of paint was too thick or perhaps not enough washing up liquid was used. However, many pieces of work came out bea
utifully and they really come to life when held up next to a window.

They're so beautiful and it's a great project to do that isn't too tricky.

DB.

Class Art- Kente cloth paper weaving

I came across this picture on pinterest and knew straight away that I had to include this as an end-of-year activity that would go well with our African unit in art.

1. Cut two identical square/rectangular pieces of paper in two colours
2. On one piece, decorate with vertical lines and patterns, on the other, decorate with horizontal lines and patterns
3. Cut vertical strips along the vertical line paper and go close to the edge of the paper but not all the way to the end
4. On the other piece of paper, cut all the way across horizontally to make strips with a similar width
5. Weave the horizontal strips into the vertical strips
6. Use  coloured paper to add extra details like face/arms/legs and the hat.
7. We added an extra border by following instructions that I found here

They had not done weaving before so some found this quite tricky but I was very impressed with most of the final results. They were a hit at our mini gallery (to be blogged about soon!) because they were so different to anything else that we cover.

DB.

Class Art- African masks

This is a big post about the amazing African masks created by my home class. This was an incredibly enjoyable project that required extensive planning before going on to producing our masterpieces. Our first lesson was spent looking at lots of examples of African masks and we discussed tribes and traditions. We broke our pages into sections and sketched out possible ideas for our mask, trying out different shapes and sizes.

Once we'd chosen our design, we then spent the next lesson discussing and exploring colour. I let the children use brighter colours than what we had researched if they wanted to as long as there were still clear features taken from African masks. We broke up the page into four and drew our mask out 4 times. We used different colours to experiment what worked and what didn't. The next step was to draw our mask on A3 paper with our chosen colour and then label different materials we would use etc.

The next stage was to start to build the structure of our mask. We could use papier-mache to build depth and bring a 3D feel to the design. We also learnt about how to use cardboard to add depth by gluing it on layer by layer. We cut out the outline first and then built up the levels.

Once we were happy with our shape we began with the papier-mache. The white substance you can see in the picture above is an instant papier-mache which worked quite well but after trying it I felt it wouldn't work so well for the children.

We did about 3 layers of papier-mache with newspaper and a mixture of water and PVA glue. The last layer (not pictured) was white scrap paper. Once this was completed and dried we could paint our designs and add any extra embellishments.

They're just a handful of the brilliant masks that we came up with. I'm so impressed with these, particularly as they've never done anything like this before and they're still only in year 3. Well done 3B, I'm a very proud teacher!

DB.