Articles

Elementary

Article

Drawing out Your Inner Critic

Monday, May 4, 2020

I can’t draw!” “I stink!” A student’s confidence can plummet between fourth and fifth grade. They regurgitate the encouragement that I’ve taught them: “I can& ...

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Elementary Animation

Thursday, April 2, 2020

Just over a decade ago, I was a new art teacher who was very excited to bring animation into my elementary curriculum. I uploaded hundreds of images from digital cameras into stop-motion software on m ...

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Honoring Iconography

Tuesday, March 3, 2020

As part of their classroom study of the civil rights movement, my fifth-grade art students explored the idea of iconography in artwork. I showed them images of devotional art from Christian, Buddhist, ...

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Small Wonders

Friday, February 7, 2020

Steampunk is a style that combines historical elements with anachronistic technological features inspired by science fiction. After discovering this style of design, it really inspired me for an up-an ...

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Contemporary Color Wheels

Monday, January 6, 2020

The color wheel is a staple in the artroom from elementary through high school and beyond. How can we take something that is familiar—that can easily become stagnant—to a new and exciting ...

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Mindful Moments

Friday, December 6, 2019

Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. It is a skill that requires reflection and practice. It also requires the ability to imagine outside of yourself, to ...

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Busy Cities

Friday, November 8, 2019

Curiosity, adventure, and discovery may explain why students are stimulated by pictures, virtual tours, and visits to New York City and other cities across the United States. Because we live near New ...

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Exploring Bugs: Entomology as Art

Wednesday, October 9, 2019

According to scientific studies (see Web Links), there are more than 200 million insects for each human on the planet! This is an astonishing fact I discovered while researching ideas for a lesson tha ...

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Mail Art Madness

Wednesday, September 11, 2019

When I was a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art, one of my favorite teachers, Ken Krafchek, told us to get in touch with a working artist. My classmates and I had to write brief reports ...

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Robot Personifications

Friday, August 2, 2019 | SchoolArts magazine

Have you ever wondered if we are learning more from the students we teach than they are learning from us? If we take the time to observe our students, we can see that they are filled with their own id ...

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Playing Around with Paper

Tuesday, May 7, 2019

Common ideas with a fresh twist are always fun for students and teachers alike. One of our curriculum points is to create an artwork using wet-onwet painting. While this is fun and interesting to do, ...

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Soda Birds

Wednesday, May 1, 2019 | Rita Roberts

If you are like me, you’re always in search of art ideas to inspire creativity within your classroom—ideas that will allow your students to experience something new, projects that can be m ...

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Abstract Mark Making

Monday, April 1, 2019 | Jordan DeWilde

A couple of years ago, while taking my third-grade students on a field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, a student asked me, "How come we don’t study any artists who are still alive?&qu ...

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Birds of a Feather

Monday, March 11, 2019 | Tiffany Anderson and Amy Pfeiler-Wunder

Developing care for others is deeply connected to our capacity to care for nature. Ongoing interaction with nature, specifically through one’s local environment, fosters empathy and a love of na ...

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Animation Unplugged

Friday, March 1, 2019 | Rama Hughes

A colleague once complained that he couldn’t teach technology because our students didn’t have computers. Of course, you don’t need a computer to teach your students about technology ...

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Covering Comic Book Covers

Tuesday, January 1, 2019 | Rama Hughes

When I was a kid, I taught myself to draw by copying favorite cartoons from television and comic books. My peers did the same. Today, my students do it, too. Between classes, they show me studies they ...

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