raheem tech

  Y'all! Last night was our school-wide art show with the theme Superheroes! I have SO MUCH TO SHARE WITH YOU from the big night...video tours and tons of photos so brace yourself...the Art Show Blog Posts are Coming! I thought I'd kick the series of posts off with a post of what I decided to create and wear for the occasion: my Superhero Dress with Rainbow Cape!   Every spring, when we crack open our 500 lbs of kiln fire clay, I try to come up with a theme for our clay projects. All of the clay projects are displayed in the art room as that's the biggest space to showcase our 3D work. The first year we went with a theme, the art room was transformed into a 1950's diner . We all wore 50's style clothing and it was a BLAST. The following year, our theme was Pet Shop  where all the kiddos created animals out of clay. This year, I thought Superheroes would be a fun theme and the kids LOVED it! Each artist created either a ceramic superhero, a superhero car, a bobblehea...

Teacher Appreciation Week was last week and I FINALLY managed to get the fourth grader's portraits of our faculty and staff up just in time. If you recall, we created these some time ago...but I'd been saving them as a surprise for the teachers and staff on Monday of appreciation week. So I sneaked in on Sunday and got 'em all hung. They were a huge hit!   Our theme for our art show is Superheroes...so I thought that calling this The Everyday Superheroes of Johnson Elementary would be fitting. If you recall, I did a similar project to this a couple of years ago and we called it the Gallery of Gratitude . For that, we simply created drawings. This time around, we used modeling clay. More information here .  Here's the video I created for my students (and all y'all) to help them learn the process of creating a portrait with modeling clay: I got a lot of questions about this project so I'll try to answer them here.  *How did the kids pick the person they were to cr...

Well, howdy, friends! Have you started the End of the Year countdown yet? I have not...as I'm in the middle of the Art Show Countdown (Tuesday, May 15th, eep!) and cannot seem to focus on the end-of-the-school-year/light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel as I still have SO.MUCH.ART.SHOW.PREP.TO.DO. Thankfully, I'm surrounded by my amazing Art Show Mom Army who are handling the bulk of the work (matting, hanging, finding my coffee/sanity/half-eaten-burrito all at the same time). As most of y'all know, it's really just a matter of getting the kids to FINISH ALL THE UNFINISHED THINGS. Case in point: I scored an extra hour with my doubled up fourth grade classes on Friday (doubling my fourth and third grade classes is the only way I can get them for an hour. It's busy but it's worth it!). I created a To Do list for them that I posted on my big screen T.V. Here's what was on their agenda: That's a lot! Thankfully, it's a matter of finishing projects...so no new se...

  So, a while back I shared with y'all that my students were sculpting art supplies. My first graders made pencils , some of my fourth graders made glue bottles , my third graders made crayons , and my second graders made glue sticks and scissors (which I've not blogged about yet! Stay tuned!). Two of my fourth grade classes made tubes of paint. We JUUUUUUST finished them off this week as I totally forgot about them in the middle of us working with clay, sewing our pizza pillows  and end-of-the-year/art show madness. So, without further ado, here they are!    For this lesson, we used toilet paper tubes as our armature. We wrapped them with Activa's Rigid Wrap and created the paint with Celluclay. Here's the video tutorial I created: Instead of having the kids paint the words on the tube, which proved to be a touch difficult for me, they came up with their own names and wrote them on a white label. That was then attached to a black strip of paper which I hot glued to ...

  If y'all happened to read my last blog post , then you know that Monday was our fourth annual chalked ceiling tile event with second grade. Each year in the spring, second grade creates a legacy piece that gets a permanent spot in our school ceiling. This year, our amazing cafeteria manager, Ms Rebecca, requested healthy foods for the ceiling in the cafeteria. So we went with fruit. We created them Monday afternoon. By 8am on Tuesday, THE AMAZING MR. SCRUGGS had them all up in the ceiling. He loves this event as much as I do and always does an amazing job of placing them in the ceiling. I love his makeshift poncho from a garbage bag, don't you? GENIUS.    Here's how the event goes down: I borrow the multipurpose room from our P.E. teachers and cover the floors with bulletin board paper, unused ceiling tiles, chalk and foam brushes. It takes me about an 45 minutes to set up (if that, I've got it down) for my four 2nd grade classes. My Monday's are my lightest, sche...