"Parade of Pigs" For Kids

The "Parade of Pigs" is a fundraiser put on by the Ball Chatham Education Foundation, the Chatham art teachers, and young artists in the Ball Chatham School District. This is the 2nd year we have done the parade of pigs in my school district. It has been a huge success! Each teacher paints, over-glazes, and fires his or her own pig in our brand new kilns. Kilns we did not have last year, but were able to purchase with the funds raised from the Parade of Pigs last year!! Yes....I love my new kiln!

The following was taken from the Ball Elementary website:

"Meet 2013’s Parade of Pigs from Ball Elementary. Our St. Louis Cardinals pig, “The Baseball Hog”, was design by Art teacher, Emily Scannura. Levi Vorreyer, 4^th grader, designed “The Amazing Pork of Art”. Our pigs will be on display at local sponsors until May 16^th . If you see a pig, feel free to donate money. Money raised will be used to upgrade the high school auditorium. On May 17^th the pigs will be auctioned off at the Island Bay Yacht Club. Please see any schools home web page or the Ball-Chatham Foundation’s web site for ticket information."

All 20 of our district's pigs were on display and accepting money at this years all district arts show on May 10th.  Guess which pig made the most money....You guessed right!  Miss Scannura's pig, by far.  This can only mean two things, there are either some diehard Cardinals fans or some diehard Miss Scannura fans out there. :) 

Hope to see you at the auction on May 17th!

-Miss Scannura

Giant Cupcakes!!

My adaptive art students spent the past month working on these giant paper cupcakes with me. I love the way they turned out.

Goals:
To introduce painting with a foam roller. To reinforce repetition and pattern, color mixing, cutting, tearing, and gluing/squeezing.

Vocabulary:
Cutting, painting, pattern, repetition, glue, tear, cupcake, decoration, details.

Procedure:
Demonstrate painting with a textured foam roller in one direction to make a design on a colored 12x18 piece of paper. Have students use a few different colors of paint. My students enjoyed the foam rollers and seeing how the colors looked when they overlapped and mixed together.
Once the paint is dry, demonstrate cutting the painted paper into a large cupcake wrapper (the shape of a trapezoid) and glue it onto a 18x24 piece background paper. We used black. Demonstrate how to tear long strips of paper for the icing. Glue them on top of the cupcake wrapper begining with the longest strips first. Last, demonstrate how to add the details, or decorations to the cupcake. We used glitter glue and tiny pieces of torn paper for sprinkles!

I hope you enjoyed these cupcakes as much as I did! You have to admit, they are pretty sweet! ;)

Until the next time! 

-Miss Scannura

Checkerboard Weaving and Printmaking

In kindergarten I introduce weaving in the fall with a warm and cool color weaving. We revisit weaving again in the spring and also discuss pattern and printmaking. 

Objective: To reinforce gluing and weaving skills. To introduce and explore printmaking.
Materials:

• One12x18 piece of colored paper with cuts every 2" that go along the shorter, 12" side- (I fold the paper and use the cutting board so that the cuts don't go all the way to the edge- This is the "loom").
• Several 2x12" strips of paper 
• Glue
• Tempera paint
• Objects for stamping or printing

Procedure:
Students will weave Under/Over through the loom using the 2x12" strips of paper. Weave in the opposite direction every time so that the weaving resembles a checkerboard. Attache the ends of the strips of paper with glue. When the weaving is complete, stamp, or print a pattern onto the weaving. I have a collection of random objects to use. Some student favorites are Lego's, small cookie cutters, and old spools of thread.  This lesson takes two days- one for the weaving, and one for the printmaking.

 Hope you enjoy this one! It looks great on display.

-Miss Scannura

Collagraph Prints

 Once we have mastered the proportions of the face, I teach my students about collagraph print making. Ball Elementary students have done printing making in previous years, so they have used a lot of the materials before.

A collagraph is a print made from a collage of items glued to a sheet of cardboard, metal or similar flat material.  It should not be confused with ‘collatype,’ which is a type of photomechanical printing.   The collagraph is primarily used in the fine arts.   Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris and Georges Braque were famous practitioners.  The collagraph is a relatively modern form of printing, probably originating in the late 1800s.

To make our collagraph print, we used cardboard. Each student was asked to bring in 1 cereal box. Using the cardboard, students drew the different shapes of the face and features onto the cardboard with a pencil. They then cut out their features, assembled, and glued their self portrait onto one of the larger pieces of the cardboard. This will take about four classes. Once the collagraph was complete we were ready to print! Each student made 3 prints and mounted their favorite to be graded.