New Year Resolution!

Hope Knight from Mrs. Knight's Smartest Artists is has inspired my first New Years resolution.  I have had a map hanging in my new classroom since I moved in.  I have a collection from each ATC that I have collected sitting right beside the map… but not hung.  My plan is to do a similar display like this.  Hope, thanks for the inspiration!  It was fun to see Minnesota listed on your ATC map:)

 The "stuff'"

The organized 'STUFF'

The second classroom New Years resolution is to finish what I have started…  I went in over break a couple of days to clean out a storage room.  I know just as well as anyone that after a person has been in a room for many years, one starts to collect 'stuff'… perhaps too much 'stuff'.  I entered a room that had too much 'stuff' and I brought stuff with me.  Now to organize the stuff.  I had the kids pull everything out of one storage closet and place it on the tables in my room.  I have organized one storage closet and now I have to finish labeling and MAINTAINING!  That is the second classroom goal.  I'm sure there will be more, but for now… these are doable.

What are your New Years goals?  Are you posting about them?  Let me know, leave a link in a comment.

My new office!

We finished up our office over the break.  I'm so excited to have it done.  We used our guest bedroom's closet to make into an office.  I want to be there all the time!

I love the organization!  Of course this is from IKEA as is the stool.  I also have a couple of office supplies on some of the selves too.

My husband is very handy.  He placed several outlets and the switch for the light inside the closet.  It is nice to have all the cords from chargers and cameras all in one place.

I had to make it super 'girly' with a cute little chandelier.  With the pink walls, this place was made for me:)

When we are done working we can just shut the doors and put all the office headaches away.  I love the way it turned out!

YAM Flag Design

Even thought I only have students for one quarter at the middle school level, I like to offer contest for all the students to participate in.  This last one is for Youth Art Month Flag Design.  Some of the entries were fun and outside of the box.  It was fun to see what students can come up with with such little direction.  To see some of the others please visit my flickr site.  I did a little advertising on our morning show with the kids help.  Check it out!:)

7th Grade, Emphasis

7th grade enjoyed creating emphasis in their latest artwork. I asked the kids to draw their picture and place a frame 1 inch thick or more around the most important part. Students shaded with their graphite pencils inside the frame. The goal was to create the same values that they would be creating with colored pencil. The colored pencil needed several layers to be successful. I stressed that they should show shadow and emphasis in this assignment. Good Job Kiddo's!

7th Grade, Emphasis, a set on Flickr.

No. 2 Pencil Challenge

Some of my 8th grade students choose to take on the no. 2 pencil challenge.  they had to transform a image using number two pencils.  I thought the kids did a good job and I was excited to see their creativity.  I altered a lesson I saw on this website… (click here).  If you would like to see a few more pencil drawing check out my flickr account.

With a bow on top:)

I had a great response on the holidays bows that I had my students work on last quarter create.  There were a lot of comments and due to the response I wanted to give you a little more on the lesson. So as a Christmas gift from me to you, I have created a step by step worksheet on how to create a holiday bow.  I uploaded it as a Google Doc (click here).  It's just in time for the holidays!

SchoolArts printed my article!

WHOO HOO!!  I'm so excited to announce my first article.  I have been honored to have clip cards in SchoolArts Magazine but now, AN ARTICLE!  I'm so excited I can hardly contain myself.  I have always been challenged by writing so for me this is an amazing opportunity!  Click here to go to the digital version of January 2012, School Arts Magazine.  There are a lot of great articles and the cover is AWESOME (very nice Penelope Venola!).  Page 42/43 is ME, Nic Hahn!  I hope you can read my inflection in this post… I'm just so excited that I want to show everyone the work my kids created and the fun idea I share in the article.

Earlier posts about this project can be found by clicking here.

8th Evolutions Animals

8th Evolutions Animals, a set on Flickr.

Last month I was able to attend the Minnesota Art Education Association Fall Conference and came away with a lot of wonderful ideas as always! This lesson was presented by MCAD, a local art collage. I called it evolution of an animal. The presenter has several ideas of how you could bring literacy into this project. Our class was limited so we works on only the development and creation of the animal.

Eye-Fi

Do you need something to put on your Christmas list?  I have the perfect thing… This is an EYE-FI card. I bought it a while back to give it a try and have discovered it is AMAZING.  You place it into the SD slot of your camera and when you take a picture it will WIRELESSLY send the image to your computer. You read that right.  You take a picture and you can have it placed on your computer, Flickr, Picasa or a lot of other options.  It has saved me so much time as an art teacher.  Where it really saves time is for my husband.  My husband is a Tech Ed teacher at my school.  He is in charge of yearbook so he has students carry around 5 different cameras a day to get images.  Now, when they take a picture the images are automatically sent to his computer.  They are organized and placed into folders according to camera and date.  HOW COOL IS THAT!  Put an Eye-Fi card on your 'wish list' today.

The POWER of Zentangles

I asked this quarters 8th grade to strike a pose the first couple of days in art class. Talk about a get to know you activity. I explained that they would be using the pictures of themselves to create a zentangle project. I loved the creativity of some of these works. There are a bunch of others on my flickr account. Please visit and ENJOY!