Candy Crayons

To match my new crayon themed classroom, I decided to make some chocolate covered pretzel crayons for all my students.   I have about 200 students and I wanted to give them out in packs of three---so I needed to make 600 candy crayons.

First I cut the pretzel sticks in half and dipped the ends in colored chocolate.

Next I had to add the labels...

Finally I packaged them up and added a colorful label!

'Twas the Night Before School Starts...

I posted the following poem and pictures of my completed classroom on my Schoology account and classroom blog as a way to greet parents and hopefully get the students excited about the upcoming year in art!

The Night Before School Starts

'Twas the night before school starts, and all through the halls

Not a creature was stirring, except Miss T. decorating her walls.

Her classroom was ready, the tables were neat

Just waiting for artists to fill up the seats.

The brushes and paints were lined up on the shelves,

With hope that the children would clean up after themselves.

With scissors and paper and glitter and glue,

The budding artists will have plenty to do!

Using iPads for research and the Osmos to draw,

The students will look at their artwork with awe.

Miss T. is excited, she can hardly wait

For the children to arrive and start to create.

Welcome Back!

Art Room Refresh

Several years ago I made tissue paper pom-poms like these to hang over my tables so that I could color label each table.  Over one table I had pom-poms in different shades of green, then a second had different shades of purple, a third was orange, and so on.  The students loved them, and they really gave the room a nice pop of color.  It was also a great management tool.

However this year when I went to set up my classroom, I felt it was time for a change.  The darker purples, blues, and greens seemed a little faded and there was certain to be dust settled in the folds of the tissue paper.  Also, I had noticed that more and more classrooms in our building seemed to have versions of them hanging from their ceilings.  

So, what could I make to replace the pom-poms?  I knew I wanted to keep the concept of different color tables and decorative aspect of hanging something from the ceiling.  When I saw these mailing tubes and cardboard cones sitting in my storage closet, I instantly knew I was going to be making giant crayons!

Step one was to attach the cone to top each mailing tube and use plaster wrap to papier-mâché each crayon.

Here are the crayons while I am waiting for the papier-mâché to dry.

Step two was to gesso each crayon and then paint each one a different color.

Finally I drew and colored a crayon logo on posterboard, glued on the labels, and hung them in place.

  I am pretty excited to see how the students react to the classroom refresh.  Let me know what you think.

Another New Year...

Once again the signs that summer is drawing to a close are everywhere---the school supplies that appeared on the store shelves July 5, the popup Halloween store appeared the first week in August, and yesterday my back to school letter came in the mail!  Time to start thinking about putting my art room together.

When I visited school this week none of my order had arrived, so I decided to start putting together one of the bulletin boards outside my room...

Last week I came across this post on BuzzFeed and thought it would make an awesome art bulletin board.  Pokémon has become an amazing phenomenon this summer and I am going to follow the lead of many major art museums and embrace it.  Thanks to Sarah Wainschel for creating these hidden Pokémon masterpieces that I printed and used for my board.  She creatively photoshopped a different Pokémon into each painting.  The challenge will be for my students to find where each Pokémon is hiding!  Look carefully...can you find them?

I framed them with border to give the pictures a finished look and printed out images of the hidden characters from the Pokédex.   I stapled each character next to the picture it was hidden in so the the students would know who they were searching for.  Finally, I labeled each picture with the title, artist, and year to incorporate some art history/appreciation learning into the Pokémon hunting fun!

Now I just need to add a title, and one bulletin board down...two to go!