Stop! COLLABORATE and listen :)

Collaboration is sometimes a scary word in the ears of art educators. In my county, we are a close knit group of art teachers and we work well together on many things. One of my feeder elementary school art teachers and I have been wanting to collaborate somehow for the last few years but couldn't ever get it together.


This year we made it happen, and it was glorious!

We gained some inspiration from https://themonsterproject.org/ and made wonderful works of art like this happen:

A class of first grade students at one of my feeder schools, were instructed to draw monsters. There was little to no direction, just their own creativity! The art teacher then brought their monsters to me and students in both of my 7th grade classes were assigned a first graders monster. 

We had a brief discussion about uninhibited creativity and how little kids have developing fine motor skills. We talked about shading techniques with colored pencils, the importance of coloring neatly, and how our monsters were a re-make of the originals. Then I set them free!

This project was an easy way to collaborate across grade levels and I am very impressed with not only the first graders original monsters, but also with my own students remakes of them!

A Professional Development Day for Teachers

Today at School we had a "Day for You" professional development day at my school. After seeing a post by Cassie Stephens: 
https://cassiestephens.blogspot.com/search?q=professional+development+for+teachers

I offered to my principal to do this for our teachers. She turned our professional morning into a Wellness morning, teachers were divided into 3 groups and rotated through an Art project, a Family and Consumer Sciences experiment and a PE physical wellness activity. 

I began the morning by setting up my classroom for the project

 As teachers came in I showed them a brief Prezi presentation 
https://prezi.com/view/K3vCJj2Fu8yQJnO1cI8Q/

I told them they would be creating an abstract work of art. As that dried, they would be thinking of a simple sentence that describes why they teach. We talked about some people have good days and bad days, sometimes in education, you have a bad year... but there is a reason that you keep coming back.

I said that reason might be July... or maybe its about relationships with students, or maybe a love of the curriculum.. whatever the reason, you always have a reason! 

After they painted their abstract background, they either wrote, painted or printed their why onto their painting. I didn't have any complaints, other than the occasional "I can't paint" to which I replied, you CAN! Anyone can paint an abstract work of art because it doesn't have to be anything!

The teachers seemed to have a good time doing something they never get to do!

Thank you Cassie Stephens for this fantastic idea, I had so much fun with it!