My Art Teaching Adventures continue in 2016...Classroom Organisation

Somehow, it is already week 5 in term 1. I successfully got a role as a full time primary visual arts teacher (a career goal I had really hoped for!) and was excited to set up what was going to be my classroom for the second year in a row in at SAHPS.  To start this blog off honestly, it has been a hectic start to 2016. After going through some photos tonight, I realised how much has already happened and that I needed to show what magic has been happening in SAHPS's Art room.

First off, I have some wonderful teacher friends who came in on the break to help me put a fresh coat of paint on three of my art room walls.  After a day of hard work and paint fumes, the classroom looked brighter and much more inviting to walk into.

Then came the building of shelves, organising our monitor system, decorating the walls, and making the classroom an environment that the students and I would like to come into everyday. 

I set up the art room vocabulary from last year up on the main wall, so I can refer to it as it is needed, and as a reminder to the students.  I have set up the "supply banquet" which worked really well last year, allowing the students to independently get the media they need for their projects (they also can easily put away the everyday supplies including pencils, rulers etc.).

This system of monitors has already made a huge difference to the organisation and independence of the students (and honestly it is a big help to me as well, less of my time this year has gone into cleaning up after the students!). They get an assigned role for the day and have a time limit to work in. I put up a timer up at the end of class where the art helpers do their assigned task before coming and sitting down for final feedback questions. 

The students at the beginning of the year are assigned to tables (the picture above shows the table setting this year, with one more table behind the white one), but allowed to work anywhere in the classroom as long as they are:

-Working on the assigned task and working towards the checklist or rubric

-Complete their Art Room helper role without reminders 

-Are safe in their choice of seat

Two big changes to my room that I wanted to make this year, were the ease of their drawing book tubs, and a clearly marked tub for White paper. I don't think I could go another term having to point out where the white paper was!  A third last minute idea was to have picture up of how the cushions were to be put away, allowing the students to know how to tidily put them away quickly. (Even the foundations have been successfully putting them away in the right places!) 

This is how I organised my room so far this year, with more photos to come as things keep evolving. 

Colour Theory Unit

The first thing I thought about when getting this position, was what are some base skills that the students need to learn in order to create successful art pieces and projects this year?

The answer that came to my mind from my art training was colour. While there are many other elements of art explored in this unit including form, texture, line and shape..colour was the main focus. I believe that once students young or old start to understand colour theory then all projects both in 2D and 3D have a higher level of success. 

The wall of my art room, has grown a lot more colourful since my first post! Each year level helped me sort the pencils and markers into different colours, and put them on the counter as a cool/warm colour banquet for the students to easily access for the rest of the year. The bonus of doing this gives them control of their own supplies, and the ability to get it themselves. It also solves the fighting over colours problem that comes from having the colours at different tables. 

I started each year level in a different ways going through what primary, and secondary colours were, testing their prior knowledge! Most students had little or no knowledge of these. After we figured these out, we then talked about warm and cool colours, as well as colour buddies (complementry colours).

This gave us our base for our unit( and the rest of the year!) 

In foundation and 1/2, this was our source image:

The Foundations made crayon and watercolour resisits:

And then framed them, and added their name sticker! I was very pleased (and so were the students!) in how they turned out. 

The 1/2s created paper circles, (see classroom makeover post) and used another one of Kandinskys images to create a crayon and water colour shape composition.

The 3/4s looked at warm and cool colours (and patterns) in melbourne graffiti:

The 5/6s used different Keith Haring images to source their work using complementry colours:

The students really enjoyed this project, as they got to add their own twist to it. Our school has many Samoa students in it, and they did a great job of adding symbols from their culture into their work. 

This brings my colour theory post to an end, but I know the future work by the students at this school, will reflect their in depth learning of how to use colour.