Becoming a Curator: Pet Gallery

There is a website called Sad and Useless that wrote this about a recent Gallery Design for pets. They write...

"What happens when you have lots of free time and need to distract yourself from uncontrollable life events? Well, you create an art gallery for your pet Guinea pig (obviously). That’s exactly what Teresa Mistretta did..."

This is one of the options for you to create as you become a curator.  You will make tiny works of art to go on your wall  for your pet to see. If it the art is themed as your pet, that is a bonus. Here are some pictures of that cute little Guinea Pig's gallery.

What Teresa did was create small works of art inspired by famous works of Art. She changed the theme to match her pet and hung the works of art with some tape on the wall at a level her pet could enjoy it. 

What pet do you have? What Art would your pet enjoy? I can't wait to see the Gallery you create. 

The Pet Project- 2016

The week after Holiday Break I invited 'table top pets' into my classroom for a visit.  I asked parents to bring animals such as fish, hamsters, snakes... Anything that could be in a cage on a table top.  I got a few takers for this awesome activity.  We did a lot of projects inspired by the animals that I'm excited to share with you in the next couple of weeks, but I thought I would introduce you to the animals that visited my classroom.

We had a couple of Bearded Dragons...

...Several Guinea Pigs...

... Two beta fish ...

... hermit crabs ...

... Chicken's (they didn't have names so we called them 'Chicka-Chicka, and Boom-Boom')

... Hamsters, this was a total 'cute' factor ...

... A bunny...

Hanging out with us the who week (6-day rotation) was

Suzie the tarantula...

...My daughter's pet frog...

... Pennie, the Art Studio's 'Pet Plant'... 

... and PRIDE, the Hassan Husky that moves from room to room every week. 

Boy, I think I got them all... Somedays the room was packed with pets.  Others, I was grateful to have Pennie the Plant and PRIDE, or we would not have had many pets at all. This was the first year of me doing this and I think next year I will have a better response from families.  This was an amazing way to connect with the families of my school and a wonderful hook for my students. I can't wait to share the projects that came from this exciting week at Hassan Elementary.

For more on the pet project, please click here.

The Why and How for the Pet Project

I have had the idea of the Pet Project in my head for a year now.  What put me into action was this book suggested by Mrs. Harapat, our Media/Tech teacher. It's title, "8 Class Pets + 1 Squirrel / by 1 dog = Chaos.  I read this book to my Mini's and we laughed all the way through it.  I kept thinking, wouldn't it be great to have a class pet in every room of a school.  That got me thinking, it might be fun to have pets in my classroom.  I explained this story to every class as they came in for the week.  All 750 kids were excited to rent this book and read it.  Mrs. Harapat says they can't keep the book on the shelves and she has 8 copies of it now.  I love that this project oozed out of my classroom door and into other interests of life for my students. 

There were a couple of motivators to this project.  First, I wanted to connect with the parents of our school.  I am always thinking of ways to get them into the art room.  Second, I wanted to hook the students.  Those of you who know me personally, know I'm not an animal person.  I grew up on a farm and farm animals have a different purpose than pets.  So I never have had an attachment to animals.  That doesn't mean that I don't appreciate the relationship people have with their pets.  I acknowledge that and know that getting animals into the classroom would be a 'hook' for my two mini's, so I would imagine that it would be for many of the kids at my school too.

One of the questions I received was from Lauralee Chambers about this project.  I wanted to address that in this post as well.  I sent out a message to all parents asking them to consider my request.  I did this right before holiday break to give a lot of thinking time.  The return of school in 2016, meant the start of pets in the Art Studio.  I just shared a Google Slide for a sign-up sheet.  It worked well.  Click here to see a link to a copy of this Google Doc.  I will say I didn't have all the time slots filled for each hour, but I had enough daily visiting animals in my room for the extended time, that it was still successful for the classes that had fewer pets.  The ones that were filled up with pets however were a blast. 

  

Digital Pet Books

Pet project product for the 1st grade.  This was one of the most fun products that came out of the the Pet Project.  I made a Google slide of my story.  The first story that I made, I asked the kids to write with me.  I needed 27 pages so the process took too long for a lot of the little kids in class so I adjusted the process to me writing the story about the 'happenings' of the day. This ran much more smooth.  So below, you will see an example of what I created before the students came in. I changed the story slightly each day because new pets came in for drawing.  I put one line on each page and then printed them out.  I was sure to include the page numbers so I would be able to get them back in order later on. All of this was done before the kids arrived. 

As the students came in, we talked about behavior around animals and my expectations for the day.  I read them the story in full to let them think about it as a whole.  Then I asked them to get in line and read each page to each student so they were sure to know the line that they had to illustrate.

Each kid handed in the image before the end of class.  I explained that they could included other animals in their image, but to try to highlight their part of the story in their image. I will say some of the kids went a little 'off-roading' with this request, but overall, the classes put together a great story. Below are the 4 stories... continue at the bottom for a little more of the 'how to' of this creation. 

Once the kids gave me their images, I used my iPad to take pictures of all the pages in order.  I shared them to my Google Drive (organizing them in folders).  Then I opened my slide show again.  I chose Insert > Image.

Then choose Google Drive > and then the folder you wanted, shown in the images below. 

I matched each of the images with the text already on the page.  On most of the digital books, I also placed a picture of the animals that visited that day.  The final slide is a Google URL shortener.  I made short URLs because when you do this, it allows for feedback to show when someone looked at the link.  I could track to see if after sending this digital book to each household, if they took the time to look at it.  This was feedback only for me as a communicating teacher.  I have to make sure what I do with my time is meaningful and valued... if not, I'll put my efforts else where. 

If you have questions, please buzz me a comment.  This process would be really good for a lot of things.  I would love to hear where it takes your brain.

Drawing in a new way...

There are just a few more hours before spring break.  The kids are... ummm... well, energetic.  How am I going to keep them engaged as they practice their drawing skills.  The goal, using shapes and lines to make designs... the method of obtaining this goal?  Drawing (under the tables).  Check out this 1-minute video about the activities. 

Station 1:  Pre-drawn ovals that students decorated with shapes and lines.  This was a collaborative work. 

Station 2: Drawing the eggs individually on the top of the table.  I don't want to freak kids out totally and tell them they all have to be under the tables (but most were excited about the opportunity).

Station 3: Use step-by-step instructions to create a picture.  I like to give kids the opportunity to follow instructions.  We talk about the fact that the instructions are shapes and lines too.  Thought it would be more fun... UNDER THE TABLE.

The only drawback to this was that the kids found an ant on the ground and that was a little distracting.  Something I have learned from teaching kindergarteners is that you can't control them... they control what happens in class... but you can trick them into learning a lot of the time.  I told them the Ant was my pet.  They all wanted to take a picture with my pet ant Allen... We talked about it for a while.  We talked about the shapes and lines we would need to draw this little bug.  Then I put him in his home (my desk drawer) and asked the kids to get back to work.  Can't wait to hear what the parents are told tonight.

2-D to 3-D Pets

This was a fun application for the pet project. You know I love doing 2-D to 3-D activities with students if you follow this blog.  Here is a fun example of that with some sculpture my K's did last year... click here.  One day with the pets, I asked the K's to draw the animals they were looking at and then half way through class I tossed them some modeling clay and asked them to sculpt the animals as well.  These were adorable! It was fun to see the interpretation of the drawings and sculptures. I was also surprised that the class was almost divided with who wanted to draw and who wanted to sculpt.

Monster Mediums- Ink

This is Edward Hopmaster.  Edward is a very advanced architect. He designs homes for monsters all over the world. He gets his inspiration from nature. The rich and famous monsters of the world live in the buildings he has created.  On the weekend Edward enjoys going fishing. He loves going out on the lake with his little boat and fishing from morning till night. Edward has two pet cockroaches. Their names are pepper and salt. He feeds them only candy. He thinks this makes them so sweet.

Can you guess Edwards medium?

Be a Curator

This assignment if for the week, May 4 - May 8. Week 6 of Distance Learning at Hassan Elementary. We are going to "Become an Curator"

Here are the 4 ways that you can become an curator... 

1. Be the Artwork
2. Pet Gallery
3. Floral Design
4. Visit a Museum 

For other Careers in Art to explore, please see the whole Distance Learning Playlist on Mrs. Hahn's YouTube.

Pinch Pot Pets

First grade Pinch Pots Pets were amazing. I love the variety and choice given to the students as they created their little Animal. Mrs. Hare reviewed pinch pots with these students first. Explaining, creating, and them coming back for more instruction. Students were then learned how to slip and score their 'extras' to create their pinch pot into a pet.

After firing, our students used Tempera Cakes to decorate as I did the k's (see the previous post). These were a great choice for both my K's and 1st-grade students. These 6 and 7 year-olds have a little more patients than the K's so I chose to dip their works in a bath to help seal it. They had to leave the clay in my classroom a bit longer, but it was worth it because there was GLITTER involved.  I mixed Glitter Medium (I have used both of the Mediums pictured above) 3 parts water to one part Medium in a container deep enough to dip these little projects in. See this video to see how I did the dipping. I used the mixture day after day just adding a little water and mixing it up again with a spatula. The racks that I set them on our locker shelves. TIP: if you check the lockers at the end of the year, once students leave... I bet you will find several locker shelves that you can take for this purpose.

Take a look at some of their awesome works of Art...

To see what other projects PVEMS created with our visiting Artist, Tracy Hare during Clay Week 2018, please see this previous post. 


As a slide not: This is how I take all my sculpture pictures. A simple solution to get a very professional result.

Pop-up Pets

The 2nd and 3rd grade finished their day of drawing pets with the Pet Project.  For their drawing session, they were asked to draw their animal and then write down facts that they could see from the observation.  It was fun to see what they wrote about.

This last week I asked students to make their artwork into a pop-up card.  I called them Pop-up Pets.  The third grade learned how to do pop up cards in 2nd grade and were over the top excited to show me their now more advanced skills.  Many, many kids told me about how they have created cards over the past year.   As always, this skill was magic to my 2nd graders.  If you don't do pop-up cards with your students, consider it.  It can be a jumping off point for so many projects and concepts.

I have a video that I made last year.  It cracks me up because you can hear the excitement in the kids I was teaching at the time.  Go to around the 3-minute mark on the tutorial shown in this previous post. I promise you will smile (and understand why I love my job). 

Here is an example of some 'facts' that the students wrote.  I explained that they should make the spaces interesting for the design of their card.  They wouldn't want to write all of their ideas in a paragraph, but rather small bits here and there that can be cut out of the paper.

It was hard to pick which cards to show you so I chose to show you a couple of many of the animals. Above I have the tarantula named Suzie. I show both to explain how some students chose to 'bubble cut' the details as you see in the above picture on the left.  Others really cut around each little detail.  I think the card on the right looks like Suzie is actually running across the card. Both are wonderful examples.

The three above are cards that created not only the facts of the animal but also the habitat.  As you can see, the bearded dragon had a heat lamp.  The hermit crabs lived in a coconut, and the hamster had a lot of fun tubes and toys (and I think one of the facts about the hamster is that she is 'so cute'). Again, how can you not smile at that? 

This little creative kid made his frog sitting on his card.  It was one of those celebrated accidents.

A couple more of Via, the hamsters. I show you both of these because I encouraged kids to make their animal BIG!  I think that is the number one challenge in drawing for kids... going big.  Here is the same hamster by two artists and you can see... big was hard for the one on the right. 

I loved the details for the Bearded Dragons above.  You can see a lot of detail was put into these two drawings and they really used the full space. I also like the contrast of facts in circles and facts in squares.  Not a huge difference, but a conscious aesthetic choice. 

Reflection on this project was in two forms.  Some students had time to journal about their project.  You can see the above.  With this journal I'm working on reflection and presentation encouraged by our National Art standards. Below I have a picture of a Gallery Walk.  If you are not using Gallery Walks in your classroom all the time, consider it.  Here is a Do's and Don't's video of Gallery Walks.