good ideas in art class

Today is a perfect day. It's sunny, in the 70's and clear. Deezel and I walked 4 miles this morning. I moved more house plants to their summer spots - begonias into the shade garden- , cleaned out some weeds from the back of that garden. I have some rosebud impatients cuttings ready to plant.

Yesterday, the 5th graders helped the Kindergarten class prepare their sketchbooks for their 1st grade year. This has proven to be one of those ideas that sounded really good and is really good.

The first year I taught art, I looked at the class - this year's fifth -saw strangers looking back at me and I thought, "How am I going to get 15 children to listen to and follow all the steps for putting their names in and starting their sketchbooks???

Now, I have help. And listening to the older class describe the use of a sketchbook and portfolio to them yesterday, I thanked them profusely and gave myself a quiet pat on the back. I encourage them to sketch in each others' books to have a momento of the year.
In the afternoon, the 4th grade discussed and made art about their sadness for the loss of life due to the oil spill.
DAILY HAIKU 2009
May 27 a more-typical-of-the-2009-season-day













The text says it all:
torrential downpours
interrupted by drizzle
fade the glow of spring

The five syllables of the two words is very effective.
I used a charcoal Cat's Eye, text written vertically, tracing paper in strips and colored with pencil for the rain effect. The scrap of tracing paper for the writing is edged with the grey and the text written with a Flair pen. It covers the gold/yellow spiral of sun.

May 26
This was a lovely spring day, easy to depict in art.
this entry consists of straight stamping with a Cat's Eye pad and the edge of a square, "Versa color" green. I made the grass with both the positive and negative barcode/ grass stamps. To write the text with a pen, without problems from the ink, it's on tracing paper.