My First Post

Hi! I am new to running a blog so hopefully I can grow and learn from my colleagues in the Art Ed. blogging world. I have been looking at blogs for the past two years to get ideas throughout student teaching and my first year, and I finally decided it was time to pay it forward. A lot of my projects come from adaptations of other ideas I have seen. I will try to give credit whenever I can find or remember the source. I kept meaning to do this throughout the school year and just never found time. So here it is finally! All the work up to February for the 2011-2012. It might be jumbled up because I am not sure how to change the order of my posts just yet. Here are some pictures of my little art room. The Dear Students sign I saw on Pinterest.
















I have seen a couple different ideas on how to keep kids motivated in the art room. It's always a little bit harder with middle schoolers to keep work ethics up. Some days they seem really excited and engaged, and then the next week they come in and look at you like this is the worst project ever!! To keep that from happening I incorporated a classroom management strategy that one of my amazing mentor teachers taught me. I basically have a class bank going where students try to earn money towards their class total. Its called GLAD CASH. You can earn Glad Cash for answering a question during discussion, working hard, or being a good Samaritan in the art room. I collect all the Glad Cash at the end of the class time and we add it to the class total. At the end of every semester the 5th and 6th grade class with the highest score gets to have an edible art party! The kids love it!! They totally police each other to earn more cash!!

I also give out the cleanest table award at the end of each class. If a table is chosen then each of its members gets to fill out a raffle ticket and enter it into the cleanest table drawing at the end of the week. I choose 3 names every Friday and have them posted on my board for students to see the next week. The students love it! They can either choose a prize from my artist of the day prize bin, or they can add two pieces of Glad Cash to the class total.
I will definitely post more soon about the happenings in my little art room...