I took some of my students (18 in total) on a day trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was really amazing because none of my students had ever been there before, and  it was only my third time since I had moved here in September. I had arranged for a bus to take us and a tour guide to show us around when we got there. Our tour was on Impressionism because that is what we had been learning about in our most recent unit on art history. The tour guide was spectacular and very engaging and when we were done with our guided lesson through the museum I took the students out to the front steps so that they could race each other to the top and pretend to be Rocky. It was a fantastic adventure!

For Valentines Day I tried out some crafty ideas. For all of my friends and co-workers at the school (security guards, office staff and all) I made small, individualized heart collage cards. I used stiff card stock paper and different hearts I cut out of images from different magazines. I also sewed together some colored felt to create a boom box pillow for my boyfriend. I was very flattered when he asked me where I had bought it! I was inspired by some of the handmade items I had seen on etsy.com and this gave me a good gauge of how long it would take to do a project like this with my students.

After studying the proportion of the human face, we created self portraits.

Here is a collage of different collages, my students made.

Since the beginning of the year I have been encouraged to hang student art work as well as keep my classroom decorated and cheerful. Lucky for me this is easy, I am the art teacher. So during our winter months of school, me and the students kept things light by making chinese style kites (a part of our unit: Art of American Immigrants) from the ceiling. Also our Mexican inspired paper cut-outs added a splash of color to the classroom. I love how it all looks.

For our end of the module (quarter) field trip, we took our honor role students (about 25) to Dave and Busters for a day of food and fun. In the pictures below you can clearly see that my co-worker, Ms. Starr, did a lot better than me in terms of tickets. Needless to say, her prize from the gift shop was much more substantial than mine.

Here are some photos from our student vs. staff basketball game in Fishtown Philadelphia. I had a blast, even though we lost to our star student basketball team!

We had some great cheer leaders as well!

That is me on the left.

Here is our art room “leagal wall.” This was a student initiated and student drivin addition to our classroom. It was a place for students to draw and “tag.” They enjoyed having a space where it was OK to doodle with no consiquences. I was quite impressed with their initiative to create such a cool thing.