PBIS Display

Positive Behavior Interventions and Support

Our school uses the PBIS system, which is essentially a system which focuses on the positive behaviors in students and rewarding those who are doing right (think "Caught you being good" type of thing).  At the beginning of the year we decided we needed to really reiterate our PBIS expectations among our students.  Yes, I said "at the beginning of the year."  I'm extremely behind on my blogging and updating of lesson plans on this thing...sorry!  

As the art teacher I wanted to create some nice visual reminders.  Also, I wanted to fill our beautiful but empty display case.  The PBIS principles that we focus on at our school revolve around the words "responsible, respectful, faithful and safe."  Personally, I associate those words with social justice causes, so I used one of my favorite social justice artists, Keith Haring to inspire the artwork I made for our display.  I made four large posters (one for each category), a handful of paper arrows, and a few foam core Keith Haring-esque figures.  I painted the posters to look like some famous Haring works.  I asked all of our teachers to write on the arrows various examples of what positive behaviors look like (I hung the arrows in the case and they spun, so I had them write on both sides) and I asked some students who were utilizing our before/after school care program to write examples on the foam core people.  And WAA-LA a beautiful display!  A beautiful display which I forgot to photograph, mind you.  I did manage to photograph all of the pieces after I took them down (once I realized that I didn't get a pic of the whole shabang).  So please try to imagine  all of these lovely little items hanging and standing in a lovely display case...

            

        

                                      

Saints Art Contest

Iowa Catholic Radio's 'Our Catholic Schools Rock!' Art Contest--2015 Theme: Saints

So I've been extremely behind on my blogging and I have zero (good) excuses for that.  But I figured I might as well pick up where I'm at in the classroom and share what the kiddos have been up to!  When school started back up, I found an invitation for my students to participate in a Catholic art contest, my kids LOVE art contests and this was no exception.  

The contest is for K-8 students and is divided into various age categories.  I shared all of this info with my students and let them know that the contest's theme was "Saints."  I collected as many books on saints as I could get my hands on--I teach in a Catholic school, so this wasn't too tricky.  I just had to hit up a religion teacher, the library and our religious education library. I let the kids choose their saints that they wanted to depict and I encouraged them to put their own spin on their saint's portrait.  Some of the kids opted for emulating what they saw in the picture books and others played around with adding their own borders and backgrounds (which I especially loved).   They got to choose what medium they wanted to finish their artwork in, so I got to see a nice variety in styles too! This trimester I only have 8th graders in the middle school, so I taught this lesson to 4th, 5th and 8th grade.  I couldn't have been more proud of all of their hard work and effort that went into these drawings!  Enough said, not check out their finished work for yourself (warning, I'm about to flood this blog post with photos):

8th Grade Examples:

And I couldn't resist posting a few closeups:

         

 

     

     

5th Grade Examples:

And...More closeups:

  

  

4th Grade Examples:

And, finally, the last of the closeups:

 

 

 

 

Tessellations

M.C. Escher, Eat Your Heart Out

5th Grade's Tessellation Sensation!

If you've seen a handful of my blog posts, you already know that I love teaching cross curricular lessons and this one is no exception!  My 5th graders are learning about tessellations in math and naturally I jumped at the chance to teach them about M.C. Escher and his ability to make math visually beautiful!  I started by showing them this short video on YouTube:

We talked about what we saw and how many of the things we saw were familiar to us and where we saw them.  A few kids pointed out that I had shown some of M.C. Escher's work when we talked about Optical Illusions (I love when they retain that info!).  We talked about the complexity and simplicity of tessellations and I assured them that we would start off simple.  I made them a brief demo video of how we would create the tessellations (they're just getting too big to huddle around me and try to watch my live demos-so for something like this, I like to make videos).

This is the demonstration video

Once you've created your tessellating shape...transform it!

Trace and repeat to fill paper!  Color as you wish!

The kids got to work and made some amazing things.  So creative!

I didn't get a lot of "finished" photos from this lesson- I got busy (imagine that) but here is what I did capture:

Crazy Faces!

Businessman

Monsters

Horned Monsters

"Parachute Kitty"