Year+3+ideas

This page is meant for myself. I always have ideas. Constantly thinking about that next art project or how I can use that container that my husband wants to toss into the recycling.

Holidays are here. Gifts will be wrapped, opened and lots of paper thrown away. I want to write a note home to see if I can get the family involved in saving paper and the tubes from the center of the wrapping paper. Also ask for 2010 calendars that are going to get tossed.

1-01-11 Trying to get back into the mindset after lots of holiday food and family festivities. I'm looking through information and I found this on my ideas page. I sent a note home to all of my 3rd grade students asking for these free materials. We will see what the students will bring in to the art room. Let's hope they remember!!! I was looking up the the Bibliography page on the Yellow Cig wiki and I am unsure on how to access the "Creativity Resources". I will e mail David now.

1-8-11 I have been contemplating ideas on student work for earth day. I mentioned to my CIG that I wanted to use sea shells combined with words- but not sure exactly how. I would also like to have the students create an animation. It hit me today as I was watching Mountaineer Basketball. There was a Brita commercial explaining how Americans have used enough bottles in one year to go around the world so many times. I will need to do more research on this topic. I was wanting to let the kids experiment with stop motion using the topic "earth day". So I have been trying to find some ideas. If you go to you utube you can find a few ideas. I'm thinking the water bottles around the world would be a neat stop motion project. Check out some of the stop motion videos that I looked into on utube - I think ours can have a voice! [|**http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=earth+day+stop+motion&aq=f**] I also stumbled upon a site called Earth Hour which will be March 26th this year. Could we do something with this? Check out the link if interested []

1-12-11 I am unsure of including the stop motion video with our traveling exhibit, or if this will be an extra project to go along with earth day. I have been thinking of these sea shells that I collected at the ocean last year. I had hopes of having students create a plaster mold and then pressing clay into their mold to create their own shell. We started to explain our ideas for what our projects would "look like" last meeting. I felt that turning a collection of sea shells into a collection of collaborative ideas that this could be pretty rich. What would I do with this??? My ideas became more concrete today. My students will learn to create Haiku poetry. They will create a haiku about the earth. Each student will create a plaster mold using a seashell. Clay will be pressed into their plaster mold and they will have themselves an individual shell. The students will write one phrase of their haiku on the back of the shell. This will turn into a large collection of haiku poems.

2-13-11 I just wanted to write a reflection of how my portion of the project is coming. It has been a big crazy as there have been many weather delays and cancellations. We knew that would be an issue. The students took pretty well to the haiku poetry. They mostly wanted to write their own ideas (and not keep it nature related). I encouraged them to do that on their own time and bring it in to read to me during recess :) One class session was used on experimenting with the collection of individual lines and then working them together to create a new haiku. The students have had so much fun with this. I'm a bit worried about how the final art piece is going to be received. It is very conceptual and my students are having fun with the idea because they now have a strong background on haiku poems as well as our idea. More pictures will be posted soon of our experimentation day.

2-16-11 I am writing today, but this thought has been with me for a couple of weeks now. How are the students tiny seashells going to be displayed? They have to be in three separate containers or spaces in able to differentiate between line 1, line 2 and line 3 of the haiku poems. I have been asking the students the same question. Some of their responses included, sand, glass vases, bowls of water, and childrens sand buckets. I thought the sand buckets was a brilliant idea, however I wasn't sure how easily that would be as a viewer to see the shells and have a desire to engage into the piece. Two of my fifth grade classes collaborated on a couple of clay pieces. We will see if that turns out - I'm nervous! This collaboration is exciting and there is great energy in the classroom - but will the shells have a home!??

2-20-11 Jamie's critique of my documentation was much needed. I need to go back in and make sure I've included details that will make my wiki comprehensible. I also need to come up with a way for the students to be able to explain their piece to the viewer. How do they interact with it if they do not know what to do??? How can I display this. I've been jotting down some ideas. Looking at installation websites- I found a really neat recycled clothing site. I thought the group may want to check it out and share with students. I posted it on the Yellow wiki page.