It’s that time again. Springtime. In my mind, spring is the time for sock puppets. I love sock puppets. Sock puppets transcend age and skill level.  Anyone can make an awesome sock puppet. Sock puppets can be whimsical and imaginative, sock puppets can take the form of self-portraiture, or your favorite person. Sock puppets allow you to create a dramatic rendition of the history of the impressionist artists in under an hour. They are cheap, expressive and accessible.

My kindergarten students are planning their sock puppets now, using the planning sheets that you can download below, which outline who their puppet is, what they like to do, where they live, and even special powers! This planning stage is preparation for character development exercises they will perform later as they progress in the Lower Elementary drama curriculum. Currently, the puppets that the Kindergarten students are imagining create quite the cast of characters: a dog, princesses and queens who eat sparkle cookies, racers, little girls, “keratas” that live in caves, aliens, and many more.

To begin constructing your puppet, gather these materials: glue gun (adult operated), single socks (can be found under your bed, or next to the dryer), buttons or googly eyes, felt or foam sheets, and any other material that will help you create your character, such as yarn, pom poms, pipe cleaners, old costume jewelry and scrap fabric.

You can easily make a great puppet simply by decorating a sock, but adding a piece of felt or foam to your puppet will help little hands open and close the mouth, and be a guide for placing facial features. The following directions will show you how to make a puppet with an inset mouth.
Heat up your glue gun as you cut an oval shape from the foam or felt that is approximately 3 inches long.

Lay your sock flat on a table and use scissors to cut a line following the sock’s toe seam.
Open the sock up at the toe end, from the slit you just made, and glue the edges of the sock to the perimeter of the foam or felt oval. This is a little tricky to do the first time, just make sure you glue around in the top half, attach the upper “jaw” part of the sock, then finish gluing the bottom half, and attach the lower “jaw.”

Now, the fun part! Using a needle and thread, velcro, tacky glue, or hot glue, add a face, clothes, even arms and legs or wings to create your ultimate puppet buddy!

sock puppet plan

smArt History was just suggested to me this evening, and I can’t believe that I hadn’t seen or heard about this amazingly rich and wonderful resource!

It has a wealth of art images, links, blog commentary, videos, podcasts and lessons. The site is navigated in an incredibly user-friendly way. Even their “about us” page is fabulous, and describes this tool in a way that I am loath to paraphrase:

In smARThistory, we have aimed for reliable content and a delivery model that is entertaining and occasionally even playful. Our podcasts and screen-casts are spontaneous conversations about works of art where we are not afraid to disagree with each other or art history orthodoxy. We have found that the unpredictable nature of discussion is far more compelling to our students (and the public) than a monologue. When students listen to shifts of meaning as we seek to understand each other, we model the experience we want our students to have—a willingness to encounter the unfamiliar and transform it in ways that make it meaningful to them. We believe that smARThistory is broadly applicable to our discipline and is a first step toward understanding how art history can fit into the new collaborative culture created by web 2.0 technologies.

I hope that you will share this with your family, colleagues and classrooms, it is as entertaining as it is insightful and educational.

One fabulous part of this school year is the opportunity to reach the community with classroom blogs through my school’s website. I can finally share all the work we’re doing in art class with parents, hurrah!  So, without further ado, here’s my first post for parent viewing:

Welcome to a new and exciting way to communicate about the Visual Arts program at Kingsley Montessori School. This page is intended to give parents a better understanding of what goes on in the art room, show concepts behind skills and techniques, shed light on the “Big Picture,” and share artwork as well as digital media, such as audio and video, more frequently. This will also be the place to find links and resources to help continue learning together at home.

Due to the overwhelming popularity and success of our Drawing-A-Day Challenge and exhibit this past February, we will have another similar challenge during the month of October, with a corresponding celebratory exhibition to share our work in November.  Details will be posted very soon!

This animation is just so clever. I’ve just received an awesome gift that should make creating projects like this a snap- a flip mino camera. I’ll post some samples of the video soon- so far I’m finding that it’s a great little tool that my students will love using.

I was lucky enough to attend a day of the November Learning Conference yesterday, which was an inspiring experience.  After hearing some of the fabulous ideas at BLC08 today, I’m impatient to start planning for this coming school year.  Unsurprisingly, one presentation that made me wiggle in my seat thinking about new possibilities was Joyce Valenza’s allegory of Pandora- where she challenged her audience to open their boxes, to ensure that all of these new tools are available to learners, that we invite our students into the teaching process, and do it all while practicing ethical use of information and media.  It’s funny, I must have had what was similar to parental pride while watching my mom present, observing the excitement and admiration of the crowd. She was fabulous.

One issue I’m expecting to encounter is the wait, however.  It seems that sharing our work is a “no no” in my school right now, while we decide as a school community what our policies are for online media.  I find myself trying to think of ways to get around parental and administrative concerns through things like audio podcasting, which was beautifully illustrated in Bob Sprankle’s Room 208 Podcasts. How do you skip around the safety and anonymity concerns in your school while still sharing and collaborating with these wonderful new tools and strategies?

A music teacher and friend, Anne Sheridan, created this unit as part of her master’s thesis, and I love the intersections of dance, music, art and history. While her unit is geared towards middle school or high school aged students, the themes transfer easily to any age level.

This is a great example of how teachers can use voicethread to make a beautiful presentation, collaborate with colleagues, and organize lessons.

Meme: Passion Quilt
The rules are simple.
1. Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
2. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
4. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

I was tagged a week or so ago by Joyce Valenza to do this meme, and I’ve been thinking about what I’d most like kids to learn, boiled down into one little photographic blurb.

This SCUL member (Subversive Choppers’ Urban Legion) in my neighborhood illustrates the benefits of taking risks, especially frightening ones. Dare to expose yourself to criticism, to look different, to ask dangerous questions that may not have easy answers. Art is all about taking risks and pushing boundaries. As elementary students, taking risks and deviating from the plan can have varied results for those brave enough to try. Being their teacher, I need to always encourage and reward the students who choose to ride that quadruple-decker bicycle down a main street at rush hour. Wahoo!

I tag anyone reading this blog to post their Passion Quilt as well.

Yesterday, I experimented with two upper elementary students to make drawing tools out of things we found laying around. Some of the most useful tools were:

• feathers, their plumes uses as brushes/stamps, their quills used as pens
• beads glued to string and dragged across paper
• hot chocolate as ink
• long dowels attached to just about anything
• burlap dipped in ink
• paper rolled in tubes and used as brushes
• our feet!

I’m still going strong on my drawing-a-day challenge, and will post some new images soon to prove it! My students and colleagues are doing a great job keeping up on their own challenges too, I feel quite proud.

Sarah Haskell has just arrived at Kingsley to begin her Artist-In-Residence weaving for the month of February. The students at the preschool building went wild for the new loom and the colorful materials we’ll be using.  It’s always exciting to see very young students dive into an array of bright, textured mixed media materials… despite the minor chaos that ensues.  I enjoyed making little clothespin people with the elementary students and watching the details they chose to add. One student gave her clothespin person a mohawk made of felt, another made a shirtless boy with a fishing pole, and one even made a  scooter out of pipe cleaners and shirt buttons for her clothespin person to ride.

I started a time-lapse video of the whole process, and will be slowly compiling two movies, one for the preschool building and one for the elementary building. We’ll see if I’ve got enough gigs on my laptop to continue this for the next two and a half weeks! If I can pull it off, it should be a lot of fun to watch, although I won’t be able to share it on the web, for the privacy of my lovely students.

I love to paint self-portraits, obsessively, as a form of introspection, a way to express what I want the world to see, almost a dissection of my face. Great, you say, so what’s the problem?

As an art teacher the subject has to seep it’s way into what I teach sooner or later, and can have mixed results. Most notably, it is difficult to draw the face, and HARDER to make it look like someone in particular. I struggle with getting a likeness of my face that I’ve been drawing for over 20 years. How do I share this love of self-portraiture with students who can be unsure of their abilities, and more importantly, how can I give them a successful experience when some students would rather not look at themselves in the first place?

Self-portraiture is inextricably linked with our egos and how we feel about ourselves, so the lesson becomes more about self-acceptance than mere proportions, observation and drawing techniques. I begin to share what I think are my own flaws with the students, laying it all out on the carpet in front of them and then I twist it around into a positive.

When I taught an 8th grade self-portraiture class, a student could not begin. He had become overwhelmed by staring at the acne he saw in his reflection. I sat down next to him and I wiped off the concealer on my face. “Everyone has pimples” I said. And he began working.

As teachers, I hope we’re all showing our students our proverbial pimples. They need to see them once in a while.