Art Vocabulary Wall

Being consistent about teaching art vocabulary has always been a weakness of mine. This year I made sure to have a dedicated space in my room for vocabulary and I was sure to make it changeable. I created and printed out definitions of words commonly used in my room. Then I added a small bit of magnet to the back and pinned them onto the Word Wall with a tack. When we are doing a project that uses the word, I can easily remove it from the wall and stick it to my board next to the standards and example.

This has really helped me remember to mention the words and the kids are starting to catch on that the words change with each lesson and they read them on their own. Little steps, but I am getting better. PDFs of these are available in my TPT store and I will be adding more to the collection as time goes on. ^_^

Elements & Principles Pack

I recently finished part of a project I have been working on for a while. I am working towards creating an entire elements & principles of art curriculum for lower elementary. Today I finished the pages of the student workbook. I am sharing a link to the pages here on my TPT in case you would like to use them in your classroom. See previews of a few pages below. The entire pack includes 17 student activities, book covers, and answer keys. Check back in the future for more resources, search the tag TPT!

Textured Hearts

One of my favorite new lessons this year comes from kindergarten! As we explore the elements & principles of art, we created textured hearts on textured paper. I don't have many in-progress pictures of this; kindergarten moves faster than my camera.

We started by using oil pastels on texture sheets to create a textured piece of paper. Then we used Crayola Model Magic to create the hearts. First we pressed them into the texture sheets, then used heart-shaped cookie cutters (yes, this is a literal "cookie cutter" lesson) to cut out the hearts. So this could be adapted to any shape, depends on what kind of cookie cutters you have. The kids were amazed and the results are gorgeous. Can't wait to do these again next year. 

And a bonus surprise: I was going to glue these to their papers when they dried, so I had the kids set their hearts on their papers to keep them together. The hearts stuck to the papers, so I didn't have to glue them! :D