The Blend

    Needless to say, this has been a neglected blog. Part of the reason, is that I use my iPad for so many things as an educator, that I stopped parking educational reflections and videos here. Another reason, I started my "Daily Repeat", making art every day, or nearly, and that has been keeping me busy (oh, and teaching full time, being a mom, wife, etc. & etc.). My most recent post is above (#315). I should add that I was busy checking out colleges and doing myriad paperwork for college apps for child #1 (a wise co-worker told me that the college stuff is like a second job, and that was so true)...
   One of the primary things is that I got so involved with learning new technologies, and man, there is only so much time in the day. Art education/teaching/my own learning curve all blended together this year. My 5th grade art club students made a "sandmation", and they collaborated via Edmodo to design "sprites" for our gifted math kids to make educational math games with using Scratch, a free programming suite from MIT! Here are a few examples of those, to the right. --->
  We even Skyped with a storyboard artist from Paramount Pictures. That video can be seen on my school website, www.lgirbino.com
   I wrote two grants, one for a clay tile mural we will do starting next fall, and another (pending) for a "Robotics Theater" (building honest-to-goodness robots, programming and everything).
   I just posted images on Pinterest of our district art show in May. We had hundreds & hundreds of pieces of art from grades one through twelfth!
   And then, there were SLO's (Student Learning Objectives)--the new evaluation tool for teachers that do not have Value-Added data. Yes, all that had to be researched, written, approved.  The new state art standards are in, and we are starting our COS (Course of Study) revision cycle. All of these things are exciting and worthy endeavors, but also time-consuming. So many people do not realize how much love, energy, and innovation goes into being an art teacher (or any teacher for that matter).
   So, in 2013/14 academic year, my goal is to "blend" even more, but find the time to reflect here, too...I'll end this post with one more goody, Makey Makey---they are too cool!

2012 First Semester Reflections

I changed a lot of things this year, particularly with scope and sequence, for my third/fourth/fifth grade art students. I made some projects larger and more integrative, shrunk a few down, and overall, revised about 60% of my curriculum based on feedback and observations from last year.

• Third grade started with cartooning to break the ice and as a formative, then we moved into A.T.C.'s, followed by the four P's: painting, puppets, pop-ups and more painting (Zonkey Cartoons). see--> Ian Sands : Make Art!: How To Draw A Zonkey!: "In less than two minutes you too could be drawing a Zonkey! If you can draw a square you can draw a zonkey" Our soup can Pop Art Pop-Ups were a huge success, and the students loved learning about Andy Warhol, plus I even dragged out one of my old photo silkscreens from art school to show them. There are a lot of pictures of the pop-ups on my Artsonia gallery, third grade section. 
• In Fourth grade, I was able to bring back linoleum block printing and the results were so much better than the collograph prints of last year (these are also loaded onto Artsonia in the 4th grade section). We also had a huge integrative unit with geometry, based on Cubist art and painted "self-portraits" based on numbers (like Charles Demuth's "I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold"). We moved onto "The Wallet Project" based on Stanford University's "Design Thinking" curriculum, and I really focused the concept with mindmaps being part of the project (a quarter of the grade, knowing that many of the fourth grade teachers have students do mindmaps as a form of note-taking). Now, we just finished "flutter books" and are going to use them as the pages for our Anime/Manga cartooning unit. As far as that unit goes, so many students are very familiar with Manga, so we are comparing the cartoon-y/cute style to the more realistic style instead of comparing to the Marvel superhero proportions.
• Fifth grade changed the most, with several smaller projects (Op Art shading blobs, radial slot card designs, rapid prototype group slot card buildings) leading up to bigger projects (clay and ongoing computer centers using SketchUp and Illustrator). The slot card buildings were more experimental and experiential, but I think the students learned a lot about working with their hands, problem solving, and working as a team. I posted a video of the process on my school website , under "rapid prototype slot shelters." This was part of design challenge posted at http://www.slotshelters.com/ In fact, my fifth grade artists seemed so good at 3D thinking this year, that I squeezed in a two-point perspective drawing project right before break---treehouses, and they are looking great (in watercolor and tempera).
• Art club has changed the most in that a large collaboration has developed between my 5th grade group and the 5th grade advanced math students. The art club is designing sprites for the Scratch programmers, using Illustrator and Bamboo tablets. It is all being facilitated online by both myself and the gifted teacher via the Edmodo platform. I love hearing pings on my iPad at home, as push notifications come in--students working together, online, outside of the school day! I highly recommend looking into MIT's Scratch--it is a free download---> http://scratch.mit.edu/
• So with all that, I fell behind on updating my Artsonia gallery and school website, but I think that was a minor compromise giving me the flexibility to be more attuned to adjusting projects as they were moving along. I caught up over break, and probably nobody but me noticed.

iPad Apps

We are gathering iPad apps for a parent resource at our (elementary) school, and here are a few choice links: http://applist.me/mrvaDK Applist me is pretty easy to use, I would also add: ArtSet (free), ArtCircles (free), and StopMotion (free). http://edtechteacher.org/index.php/teaching-technology/mobile-technology-apps/ipad-as Edtech can always be relied on for great information. http://www.schrockguide.net/bloomin-apps.html Also, Kathy Schrock’s website has the apps aligned to Blooms Taxonomy titled “Blooming Apps”

A New Vision

I admit it, I sometimes lose my faith in where the vision of education is headed, but then, a student looks up from their art with a smile, or I hear someone say, "This is the best thing I've ever done!", or like today, I get a thank-you like this one... Partners in Learning Let's keep this new vision in mind: education that nurtures the 4 C's in addition to the 3 R's. The Four C's are... critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity

Integration Thoughts

Just wrapping up a big unit on Cubist art, using tempera paint with the fourth graders. It was an integration with geometry, at the request of several fourth grade teachers. We started out by answering the question, "What is Cubism?", then moved on to the art of Charles Demuth, and particularly, "I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold". I asked the students to draw a number that represents them and randomly put at least 5 ruler lines across their composition. We did a pre-assessment of geometry concepts/terms, then spent the next 3 weeks painting. I started the students off with mixing at least 2 secondaries from primaries, then let them try tints, shades, and tertiaries (if so desired). Then, I found a wonderful 4th grade geometry lesson at Smarttech and used that to review all the types of lines, angles, and shapes that they could find in their art. Students put tracing paper over their completed paintings, and traced/labelled at least 3 of the terms, plus completed a reflection. Finally, all was collected, and we did the post-assessment. Now, I just need to collate and grade all 440 (220 pre, 220 post)! So, how do I feel about all this? I like showing connections between art and other content areas, but then, I dislike giving up any art making time for testing. I am hopeful that the data will show that this was helpful, which would be a vindication of all the effort I put into this (meeting with 4th grade teachers, finding geometry resources and making them accessible in my once a week, 45 minute art class, not letting the studio time get away from us, etc.). It is stressful to catch students up who are absent, some classes will miss due to a field trip, other time management issues that crop up on integrations like this. Some other folks thoughts on integrating the arts are HERE and HERE.

School Starts and Art Apps

http://iansands.blogspot.com/2012/09/my-three-favorite-ipad-apps-for-art.html
http://applist.me/14tMIn
So far, a busy and productive start to the year. All summer, I have been playing around with an iPad for  both art creation and assessment investigations. The links above are from two amazing art teachers, and the lists are very concise for art education apps.
A few assessments apps I would add are Easy Assessment and Data Tracker.
It seems like I have been busier than usual, partly because of piloting new evaluation policies in the art room, but also because I am doing a design challenge-- making a piece of art every day. I've been documenting it on my other blog,  More Art 24/7 . I've really enjoyed the creative commitment, even after a long day of teaching. I would encourage any busy, stressed- out teacher to give themselves a similar intellectual space to challenge themselves. After all, we ask our students to challenge themselves every day, right?

Curriculum Map for 2012-13

Before you know it, it will be upon us, the 2012-13 school year. As always, I curriculum map my year (year 11 at my current school), and this is my second year of organizing around "big ideas". See my 2012-13 map below.

I also designed the "Thinking Outside the Box" icon in Illustrator as a badge for my Edmodo site. The 5 E's are something I researched for my grad level Design Thinking class I teach. They are the organizing principles behind curriculum that promotes not just thinking like a designer, but also problem-based learning.