I don’t know what happened but I have been a total loser pants when it comes to blogging this year. I promise I’ll try to be better in the new year. We are already 2 weeks into the second quarter and I have only done one blog post this year. It’s not that we haven’t done some amazing art, but it seems like this year kind of got the best of me. So many of us have said that we have felt ‘off’ this year and while we can’t quite put our fingers on it, part of me feels like this year is just a long continuation of last year. Many of my classes are the same make up of students. In some cases, that’s a good thing, and in some it isn’t.
We have to do ASWs this year. For those of you not in North Carolina, ASW stands for Analysis of Student Work and is our state’s way of ‘testing’ those classes that don’t fall under the umbrella of regular end of grade or course testing. Luckily, my county opted out of the method that the state came up with and has chosen to use an alternative way of assessing student growth and proficiency that was devised by another county. This was explained to us in the beginning of the school year, but it is a little bit confusing and we are all kind of just flying blind with the process hoping that we are collecting samples and teaching our standards in a way that we can show our administrators what we have been doing in our classrooms this year.
That being said, I have been super impressed with my student’s work this year. I have some super talented kids that love being in my class. Some of their work has been extraordinary. It’s so nice to work with kids that really enjoy art and are conscientious about their work. We’ve done water color landscapes and 3D masks and we’ve collaborated with Social Studies. We’ve explored new mediums and worked on our skills. I have about 35 more classes with these kids and I am really going to miss them.
Below are some pictures of our latest projects. The first set are inspired by Sandra Silberzweig. We looked at her work and had some great discussions about different ways of portraying faces, uses of color and pattern. The kids are on to me...they have definitely noticed that I am drawn to bright colors. We used super big black construction paper and crayola color sticks on this project. The second set was just supposed to be a quick project that I left for the sub when I had to go get a root canal. I surely didn’t expect them to turn out as nicely as they did. I wish I knew who to link back the ‘Silly Sandwiches’ project but it is all over the internet.
We just realized that next week is Thanksgiving. Where is the time going? It’s going to be Christmas before we know it. Here at AMS we are having our first Bonfire Night this evening. It’s definitely that time of year.
Sandra Silberzweig Portraits
Silly Sandwiches Sub Plan
