Ever since I was around eight years old, I wanted to be a writer. I used to create newspapers by hand, documenting stories in my house. When I was in high school, I joined the newspaper staff at school and ended up becoming the features section editor my senior year. With the support of the rest of the newspaper crew, we split that section into two: student life and arts & entertainment. Because of that move, I actually had an award named after me in the class. 

I am proud to say I am writer. I write on this blog, I write stories for myself, I write lesson plans and papers for school, and I even write for some publications like the one featured above in this month's issue of SchoolArts Magazine. One of my goals this year is to write more articles for submission to SchoolArts. It is a great way to share processes of successes in classroom management and outcomes and it is a great way for me to reflect on and grow as a teacher. If you are interested in learning how to submit, I encourage you to review the requirements here.

This was a great way to start 2018, especially since the work featured in the article happens to be our ArtPrize 9 piece, "Painting Under Papercuts." 

Our students worked really hard this year to try new media, push their ideas beyond the obvious solutions, and work with ideas that explored concepts both personal and universal in theme. I am really proud of the results of their efforts and how they took the creative risk of placing many of their works into competition this year for the 2018 Scholastic Art Awards. 

This year seems to have been a particularly tough competition. Our district had 55 works place for recognition:

We are so excited for our students whose works were awarded Gold Keys that get to go on to the national competition in New York City. It is extra exciting that we also had a high school student achieve an American Vision Nomination. We will find out the national results later this spring. 

To view the works that I helped enter this year, check out the images below. I am so proud that these students were willing to put themselves out there and I look forward to seeing what they make next! 

I know that we should all still be in the thralls of summertime, laying out by the pool, drinking lemonade, and forgetting what day of the week it is. But, if you are like me, you have already had that first back to school dream (or nightmare) and have started to make strategic goals and plans for making this upcoming school year one the best one yet. Well, I have partnered with Scholastic to get your thinking about your classroom in this post and offer you a giveaway!

When thinking about plans for the fall, one that it a no-brainer for me is the inclusion of Scholastic Art Magazine to my curriculum. For those of you not familiar, it is a resource for your classroom that connects students to artists using a variety of timely themes, genres, and materials through print and online media.

I was lucky that I was first introduced to this resource during my student teaching days back in 2004. My mentor teacher said it was the single most important resource for her classroom because it organized artists and their work in ways that made it both relatable and age-appropriate for students. She had stacks and stacks of magazines that dated from decades before and that we both used them as ways to connect students with content in our lesson plans.

13 years later, I not only have stacks and stacks of my own Scholastic Art Magazines dating back over the last decade-plus that I can use with my students in various ways, I also have access to an online portal that allows students to view the content of current and past issues whenever they want. In addition to the text of the issue, students can access videos, slideshows, and other resources to deepen their understanding of artists, media, and concepts through the online portal. 

Here are a few of ways I use this resource in my classroom:

• Integrate reading and writing strategies in my classroom. 

If your school is like mine, we are always looking for ways to meaningfully weave reading and writing strategies into all of the curriculum. Using Scholastic Art Magazine offers an easy way to do this. Not only can you adjust reading levels on the online portal, you can also print reading comprehension questions at various grade levels to differentiate instruction based on your student population and needs. I use it most often for a writing prompt I call "Artist of Interest" where students use a specific-standards based rubric to write about an artist of their choice from any of the issues offered. 

• Easy substitute teacher plans.

Sometimes it is easier to go to school sick rather than figure out what to have students do when you are gone. As an art teacher, the amount of mess you might come back to when you leave your classroom can make the the idea of going to Professional Development Conferences seem impossible, too. With the amount of grade-level resources included in the subscription to Scholastic Art Magazine, I know that I can be away from my classroom without leaving a basic project behind for kids to do. I can use the worksheets, activity guides, and other resources to engage students in learning that can deepen their understanding of what we are learning in the classroom without the worry of it getting lost through a substitute. ​

• Connect students to Art Careers.

One of the more emerging areas of interest for me is connecting students to a career opportunities. There is a strange false narrative out there that artists can't make a living. I am not sure where it started and why it persists, but it is really not true. All you have to do is turn to the back pages of Scholastic Art Magazine and read the various careers they highlight in their issues. In addition to interviewing various professionals in the field (ranging from Crayon Engineer to Roller Coaster Designer and Wildlife Photographer), Scholastic Art Magazine's online portal showcases these careers in one spot and allows students to learn more about the professions including skills and education needed and even range of salary. I want my students to make art because they enjoy it and I want them to understand that they can also make a living from it.

I have also shared various projects my students have done on this blog using the magazines for research on their Elements and Principle Videos from several years ago as well as their Artist Rooms from just this past year.  I am also obsessed with the student showcase offered in each issue from former Scholastic Art Award winners and use that as a way to show students what their peers are doing in the art world, too.

So, now that you have heard some of the great ways I use Scholastic Art Magazine in my classroom, it is your turn to tell me how you would use it in yours! Thanks to Scholastic, one lucky teacher who comments below about how they would use a Scholastic Art Magazine subscription in their 2017/18 classroom will win a class set! Deadline to participate is July 17th! 

I am excited to read how you would use this great tool for your students, so please share your ideas! Then you can go back to drinking that lemonade, evening out your tan, and wondering what day it is... or more likely start prepping for the school year. 

Students really started applying all of the demonstrations we went over last week as they made final sketches before diving into creating the work for this Challenge. The theme this time around is Biography/Autobiography. It has been fun to see the different people students have selected to highlight in this work and the narratives they have shared and created to turn their ideas into concrete works of art for others to see. 

Here are some of the highlights as students make their work this week:

I even got in on the fun and was able to bring in elements of a piece I have been visiting for the last two months and finish it. I enjoy demonstrating my process to students so they can see how I struggle through solutions and work with a variety of media to figure out exactly how and if something is done.

Working side by side with my students is something I just started doing in the past few years (really since I adapted a choice-based or TAB studio). As my students were encouraged to become artists in their own right, I found it was more powerful if I did the same. This helps me practice what I teach and it helps students 

This week, we watched the TEDx clip of Austin Kleon's talk, "Steal Like an Artist." I show this to students to encourage them to gather ideas and use them to make new work. I even took part of one class period to do some independent research and writing about artists using Scholastic Art Magazine.

​I love using this resource in my classroom because it is easy to get students to use it and the content is so rich for our subject area. It is always fun to see what students select as being the work they want to write about and why. My hope through doing activities like these is that students will be able to "Steal Like an Artist" and use the ideas offered in ways that make sense in their own work.

Here are some of the responses given:

The second assignment in our DE Intro to Photo for Non-Majors course is all about capturing movement. Students worked on various methods and means to capture motion with most of the focus being on controlling the aperture and shutter speed. 

Here are some of the highlights from their work with this challenge:

February is tough. At least it always seems to be for me.  I wish I could say it was easy because it is so short, but it is not. I think that is why it is a shorter month. And although everything is starting to come to a fever-pitch with competition deadlines and notifications, it is nice to come back from lunch to a note like this on my board. 

I love what I do and am so thankful I get to go it. I cannot imagine anything other than being an Art Teacher to children, even when it gets a bit tough. 

I love to share what we do in the classroom with others. I talk to my students all of time about how their work is being viewed by teachers from across the country and that they are really the thought-leaders and models for what great Art Education looks like. 

This weekend, the sharing continued as I participated in The Art of Education Online Conference. I shared how I transitioned my classroom to choice and I really cannot imagine a better decision I have ever made in my career. 

This was a short week. I mean, a two-day kind of short week. So, what do we do with that time to make it meaningful and productive? A couple of things. In addition to students working on Challenge 3 works, students also researched and wrote about artists of their choice (focusing on the use of media and what they can learn from viewing the work) and uploaded images from last week's "speed dating" challenge. 

Here are some highlights of those completed tasks: 

Our classroom is very fortunate to have access to a lot of resources thanks to grants and donations raised throughout the year. One way I use funding to add resources to my classroom is through the investment of a classroom subscription to Scholastic Art Magazine. I have subscribed to them for years and use them as a way to introduce students to new artists they they get to select from the online archives. 

Once a month, students are asked to go into the website and select an artist to write about using a specific rubric. For this round, students were asked to explain how the material the artist uses impacts they way they view it, to explain how they can learn from this artist in their own work, and to use art vocabulary in the process. 

I am very fortunate for many things I have in my life and the experiences I have been able to have over the years. For Thanksgiving this year, I had the great opportunity to travel to Tennessee and visit Nashville, Chattanooga, and the Smoky Mountains. Along the way, we visited new sites that I was urged to travel to by my fellow Art teachers. 

I want to give a special thanks to Ted, Allison, and Cassie for guiding me to visit super special places like The Parthenon, The Frist, and the Hunter Museum. It was a great time for view works of art and also enjoy nature. 

I hope everyone had a wonderful time this holiday weekend with their friends and family and that you had a moment to reflect on and enjoy the things that give you pause for thanks. 

This week marks the first week of the last marking period of the year. We just got back after a lovely Spring Break, and are jumping on our next theme: Objects, Artifacts, and Things you leave behind.

To get those groggy minds turning again, students are asked to work individually or in pairs on a note-taking activity. This is something used in our ELA classes to make connections among and between literature and students' lives, so repurposing it saves time and confusion.

In ELA, they use the chart "Text to Self, Text to Text, and Text to World" for students to connect content in a variety of ways. In my class, we are switching the word "Text" to "Art." Students then look at work by artists Wayne Thiebaud, Audrey Flack, Jim Dine, Janet Fish, and Mitchell Feinberg as they complete the chart. Afterwards, students start brainstorming ideas for their own work by creating at least five thumbnails for planning.

It is a nice activity that takes most of the class period for students to do and eases them back into thinking critically about Art. This theme has yielded the most awards for my students over the years and I am pretty sure this activity has something to do with it. 

Maybe it is because I also earned my teaching certificate in English, or maybe it is because that is how I am wired, but I cannot imagine having Art without the writing that explores the intent of the artist. I also cannot image Art without the time and space to interpret and explore ideas other artists present. 

Today in class students spent some time on their Artist of the Week entry. For this, they login to our classroom Scholastic Art Magazine and select an artist to discuss. They then use evidence from the artwork as well as the reading to support their thoughts about the work. This resource is thanks to the gift of generous donors who gave to our DonorsChoose request earlier this school year.

Here is an example of the type of responses students submit:

I was able to get another photo of the 2015 Scholastic Art Award winners today. Everyone was excited to get their certificates and celebrate in the success of each other. 

Students moved from their sketchbooks and into the Scholastic Art Magazine Archives to research and interpret work cataloged there for their viewing pleasure. I cannot fully express how thankful I am for this resource as a result of the funding from our last DonorsChoose project! It was great to share the online content with students today and watch them search through the archives to find artists that spoke to their interests and then share that with the class via our Artist of the Week Schoology Discussion board. I am so thankful to those who helped make this resource available to my students! Students are also starting to think about The Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and seeing past winners showcased in the magazines is very inspiring to those hoping to achieve winning works this year. 

Check out the progress of Emma's Cootie Catcher Dress that she is working on for this year's Scholastic Art Award's competition. I think she has a great chance of achieving recognition in the Fashion Design category. This will be the first time I have ever entered student work in this category during the 8 years of entering this competition! 

7th grade students also worked on their Artist of the Week posts using Scholastic Art Magazine. Once done, they completed their knots by turning their designs into a symmetrical image after transferring the first quadrant onto the other three across the horizontal and vertical lines of symmetry. We will use these papers to transfer the image onto a heavier weighted paper and add color starting tomorrow!