Welcome to My Classroom

I have been the art teacher at Birch Creek for three school weeks now and I am loving it! I thought it would be fun to show you around my classroom. I am still working on it, but I'll show you anyway,

My Favorite part! My name right outside the door...I feel so official!

It is such a beautiful big class! Can you see the little snowmen families the kids have been working on? I've been putting them up (pretty slowly) as the kids finish them.

Birch Creek's mascot it the bulldog, so It's all about them in this classroom. Each table is a colored bulldog and they work together to earn their dog bones each week. The teams total over all points (in dog bones) throughout the month earn them the opportunity to take Arty, the bulldog back to their class for a month. They LOVE it.

Ooh, those precious dog bones...

Arty the bulldog and his clone. (The two classes with the highest points get to take them, they love Arty)
And this is the first real project I've done with them. It turned out pretty successfully! The first graders did the small guy, we called him our double decker snowman. and the second graders did the tall ones. The third graders are still working on theirs, they have an extra element to theirs...check out the picture below.
Cute right? So I taught the kids about character and style, leaving the eyes and nose off gave it a personal character and style. I taught them about dry brushing (technique), about art in play (building a snowman is like building a sculpture, creating a work of art) and finally, I taught them about art in nature, the snowflakes are an original piece every time.

So the first project was fun and turned out cute. It was hard to start out right away with a painting project. It was a lot of hard work. Classroom management was an absolute must and TONS of cleaning. But I'm glad I jumped in with this project, I know I can handle anything now.Next week's projects are going to be so fun (and cute) I'm pretty excited to see how the kids do.