The blank canvas is not what inspires awe, rather it is the beauty of the colors and the manner in which they have been applied on it.... So, here I am "Passing the Paintbrush" let's see what awe we can inspire together!



Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Belated December posting...It's begining to look alot like Winter!!!



So sorry, this was my December post that was suppose to be posted prior to break and due to unforeseen illness I was not at school to share it with you.  Enjoy!

We have had so many wonderful things going on here at the Rock.  We usually do this time of year!! We have really been busy trying to get some winter works made and up in our halls before we leave for break. I am so excited to see winter coming to life in our halls at the Rock, it helps to bring about joy and excitement within the kiddos. We are closing up on the work we are doing on our projects and we are putting our portfolios together to bring home.

Our Big Thank You went over well and we delivered around 650 letters to the troops. The Bert Show has also been getting letters back from the troops to share with us on the radio.  Some of the kids have been telling me they are hearing on the radio! We have a teacher here at the Rock whose son was recently deployed to Afghanistan, so the Big Thank meant a little more this year as we were sending one of our very own Rock family members into the world to help make, keep, and fight if needed, for peace within other countries and always for  our own. So, A very BIG THANK YOU to him especially this year, leaving his family at this time of year and to his parents for raising such an honorable and selfless son. We love and miss you, come home soon!!

Our art that has been at the Collins Hill Public Library have come down.  I am however, wanting to keep those works for a little longer, just in case I think some of our friends work is deserving of the county art show in the spring. I am scheduled for the Collins Hill Library to have another display in the month of March and look forward to finding new artists who are working hard and making marvelous works so they too can join in on the art showing fun that we are amping up around the Rock this year.

Art Club has been exciting... We have created our Visual journals and the kids are filling them up with all kids of drawings, writings, clippings, paintings, pictures... they are painting a 16 X 20 canvas with acrylics, and they all have completed a ceramic vessel on the pottery wheel this week. We are going to paint our pots and put them back in the kiln to fire and finish. Only two more meetings with fourth graders and then fifth grade Art Club starts.

Look here for a few of the things we have worked on for our Winter art projects.


1st graders- Created penguins, we were practicing our ovals and circles and then our patterns too. We discussed how we can use geometric shapes to create anything, it is all a matter of how we put them together. (Sorry it's not orientated properly, for some reason I couldn't get it to stand up, he must be tired!)

2nd grade- Some second grade classes were working hard on learning the patter needed to weave and we used that pattern to help us weave our paper weaving.  This was a one day preview of the cup weaving that was to follow.


1st graders worked on learning about Paul Revere and his amazing silversmith skills. We learned the parts of a teapot and then practiced with play doh on how to make the parts and learned how to produce the final product!

4 grade levels discussed the importance of line in art and in our world around us, we reviewed lines and talked about how we could use those to create designs and patterns that would help to separate spaces for us. This was when we jumped into our world of Zentagling! This is a fifth graders example, out theme was Rock Springs 5th grade graduating Eagles, Class of 2013!

Kindergartners had a great time getting into the fabric and button bins, they also enjoyed the tearing of their snowmen. We were working on tearing skills first, then we were able to use stamping, drawing, cutting, and gluing to top off our snowmen!

Some Kindergarten classes were short of time due to schedule changes, so they created a simpler version of the snowman above, these too were fun and the students enjoyed it!

This fifth grader enjoyed the freedom of exploration of materials. Mainly concentrating on fabric and paper but she did a great job of completing a work of art based on the theme of Winter.

3rd grade worked on the completion of their first snow portraits! These were fun and the students had the scrap box at their finger tips, tearing and cutting to compose a beautiful portrait. Our goal was to use as much of the space as possible to illustrate our emotion we might show if it were to snow!

2ns graders used some coffee filters and took off to the scrap box also, freedom to choose and create a snowman of their choice. We had snowmen dressed up in costumes, snowmen drinking hot cocoa, snowmen doing all kinds of things. This project was also fun and was awesome for the students to get to express their own ideas creatively.

some 4th but most all fifth grade classes enjoyed working large, 18 X 20 actually. We created a background of our choice and then created our birch trees by painting with cardboard. Our principal for a day also was able to enjoy seeing these in process.

Viewing snowmen from a different perspective can be fun!  So we learned. Our halls were all a glow with these beautiful perspective creations revolving around a snowman. When the class voted and choose a snowman work of art they were excited, but scared after I told them not your everyday snowman... a snowman from the above!

Kindergarten learned about how things that are far away are closer to the top of our paper, things that are closer are near the bottom.  They also learned about how the things that are closer a larger in size. Here is a nice example of a snowman in the foreground that is near the bottom and larger and a snowman placed in the background that is closer to the top and smaller to create a sense of depth and reality.

These are a few of the creations we have been working so hard on. I am excited to see the new year come and even more excited to see it start! See ya back in January!