raheem tech

  Last week I got a wild hair and decided that I needed to paint not one piece of furniture for my art room but three. And the process was so stinkin' easy, I thought I'd share it with you. Here you go: A while back, I created a couple of murals for my art room and I didn't end up using all of the paint. I kept the paint and I'm so glad I did (I mean, what else was I gonna do with it?! I'm an art teacher AND a hoarder, HELLOOO!). Now I can make sure that, despite all of the different crazy patterns, everything kinda-sorta goes together because the colors tie it all. Says me.    All this madness actually started with a cabinet that I'm now calling Sketchbook Town (see below). But then on Friday afternoon, I just couldn't stop! I repainted my easel that had become sad and ugly with just blobs of the cold colors. Thinking I'll paint the reverse with the warm colors. That cabinet was a score from the teacher's lounge. The space below that table was just ...

Hey, y'all! Just thought I'd pop in and offer up this Dot Day activity sheet I created for my students. I was out last week and created this activity for my students to use with the sub. If you'd like this free downloadable PDF, then here you go ! When I write lesson plans, I try really hard for my sub to do the same lesson with ALL of my students, kindergarten through fourth. This makes my sub's life so much easier and that's my ultimate goal. I have a TON of sub plan videos on my YouTube channel  (you really should subscribe! I'm uploading videos all the time!). I also have a whole lot of blog posts all about how I prep for a sub. In fact, there's a blog post of my very favorite sub plans!  For this lesson plan, the sub notes were simple: 1. Read The Dot to the class. Engage the students in questions about Vashti, the main character of the book. How did her attitude toward creating change? How did she share her new outlook with another potential artist? 2....

Painting with kindergarten...ahhhh. It's kinda crazy to think that one can experience literally ALL OF THE EMOTIONS in one 30 minute class period: happiness, fear, chaos-management anxiety, bliss, fright, horror and so much more. I decided to dive into painting with my kindergarten for their second art project ( you can see our first day projects here ) and I thought I'd share a little of what my lesson looks like. If it strikes you as familiar, that is because it's not that different from how I introduce painting to all of my students .  Before I dive in to that, I have quite a bit to say about kindergarten. You can take a listen to my last two episodes all about kindergarten here: And here: And here's me teaching painting to kindergarten on the very first day: So much silly, so little time! Let me share with you about this lesson. In the first 30 minute art class, you see me introduce my students the concept of The Store . In my art room, that is the supply gathering ...

Every year, I like to start my students with a school-wide collaborative. In fact, you can find a ton of our back to school collaboratives right here, just use that search bar! You can also see my third grader's school wide collaborative here.  To kick off the school year, on the third day of art, all of my first through fourth grade students began painting. I picked up packs of large paper shapes from IKEA on a recent trip. Any construction paper would work great though. The paper from IKEA was thin so it wasn't the best for painting. It did, however, give us a variety of shapes to paint on.  If you want  to hear more about my painting setup and how I introduce painting to all of my students, you can check out this blog post . Here's the break down of the lesson (keep in mind, my classes are 30 minutes in length): Day 1 and 2: Painting! We painted patterns all over our letters. My focus for those two days was introducing my painting procedures. Day 3: Working together in...

I've had it on my mind to print my students artwork on fabric for a very long time. I've done just about every variation of kid-created fabric for dress-makin' such as having them color IKEA coloring sheet fabric which I then stitched into a dress ( more details on that dress here ):  Or the time I found the fabric of picture frames! I had my students draw their self portraits on the fabric before creating that into a dress. Both of these dresses were created with Graffiti fabric markers. They've seen plenty of washing and, while the colors have faded a bit, they still look pretty vibrant. And the kids absolutely love them.  More details on that dress here.   But the idea of creating fabric from student work is one that I've been toying with every since hearing about Spoonflower . In the past, I've ordered fabric from Spoonflower and made a couple of dresses with designs created by artists.  You can check out the details of this dress and fabric here .  And deta...