Showing posts with label fun. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fun. Show all posts

9.21.2011

Masterpiece Me!

Masterpiece Me 1

Last week, I gave the art room iPads to a few eighth grade students who finished their work early.  One of the apps we had a ton of fun playing with is called "Masterpiece Me!" and you get to put your photo into a famous work of art!  Here's a little gallery of some of the photos that were made:

Masterpiece Me 2

Can you spot Mr. Leban as the Mona Lisa in the photos above?

9.19.2011

Fun with Manga

Leban Manga

My brother's girlfriend drew a portrait of me Manga-style.  I think it makes me look much younger and prettier than in real life!  I wonder if I could convince the yearbook staff to make it my yearbook picture this year... ?!!! Ha ha!

6.02.2011

Super Cool Mouse


The other day I was walking out of school and spotted this awesome little mouse running around in the wood chips.  He wasn't even afraid of me!  I was actually able to get close enough to snap this picture, and take this short video, in which you can see him helping us out by eating up the dandelions!

5.31.2011

Sandburg at 60!

I'd like to thank everyone involved with this year's end-of-year art exhibition and birthday celebration for Sandburg's 60th!  Special thanks to everyone (students, families, friends, faculty, staff, and community members) who attended the event!

Unfortunately, my photographer never showed up, so all I had was my camera phone to snap a few quick shots. If you have any photos from the event, please please please email me with them!


Above, students work on decorating cardboard pieces of a "universal" puzzle that will become a mural, which will be installed on the walls of Sandburg Middle School next year!  I can't wait to see how huge it ends up becoming!


The crew at Blick Art Materials in Wheaton ran a demonstration table all about fish printing!  It was super fun to paint these squishy fish shapes with bright colors and press paper onto them.  After peeling away to reveal the results, we added eyes and other fun details.  My brother made me a fish print, and it is currently hanging up outside the art room.  Have you spotted it yet?


Mrs. Draganowski does face painting and body art.  All night she made incredible designs on the faces of students and visitors!  I had fun with the stencils she had out for us to try.  I made a pink and blue unicorn on my arm, and added glitter!

Did you come to the show?  What fun things did you see and do?

5.20.2011

Please come to our art show!









"Sandburg at 60" is this year's culminating fine arts event, with dual purposes: 
  1. To celebrate the 60th birthday of Sandburg Middle School
  2. To showcase student achievement and talent in the fine arts

Please come if you can!  Students, families, community members, and alumni are all welcome!  There will be refreshments, art demonstrations, face painting, a community mural that you can participate in, and more!  Festivities will begin at 6:30 pm and continue until 8:30 pm. 

There will be a special performance of the choir, band, and orchestra in the auditorium.  There will also be art exhibits in the cafeteria, library, and hallways.  The crochet coral reef club will be working on their crochet projects in the library, and tours of the building will be available that evening.

Fun for all!

5.06.2011

iPod Evolution

iPods

Mr. Leban had an idea the other day to line up our iPods, all in a row, and to photograph them.  It's so interesting to see how the iPod has evolved, and to remember when we owned them, and why they were replaced...

iPod names

When I use my iPod mini (yes, it still works and I still use it!) in my classroom, the students laugh at it and call it an antique!  The black and white screen, the heavy metal wrapper... how I loved this when it was new!  I bought it for myself as a birthday present.  Not too long after, the first iPod nano came out, Mr. Leban bought it for me the following birthday.

iPods 1

The original iPod and iPod video are both Mr. Leban's.  I remember how impressed I was when I first saw how the iPod video worked.  Amazing how fast the technology progresses... it was only a little over five years ago!

iPods 2

When our house finally decided to make the transition from PCs to Macs, we encountered (what we considered to be) a fantastic deal: a free iPod touch with the purchase of my new Mac book!  We bought an additional iPod touch (so we each had one), but they were the first generation models. Once the second generation touches came out, it was near impossible to find a new case for the old ones, which was pretty frustrating.

Another fun fact is that the iPod touch did not originally come with the ability to download apps, and it was a system update that you had to purchase for $9.99 when the app store first opened up!

iPods 3

Mr. Leban won an iPod shuffle at a tech conference we went to a few months back.  The most fun part about this model is a button you can press, and a little computer voice tells you the name of the song and the band.  We like to try to pick obscure band names to see if it works right, but so far, it has!  The best we've gotten are some mispronunciations, which are still pretty funny.

And just a few weeks ago, Mr. Leban decided to upgrade his old first gen iPod touch to a current model.  Now, the question is, what do we do with all of these old ones?  What do you do with your old technology?

4.21.2011

Happy Birthday Mr. Leban!!!


It's Mr. Leban's birthday today!  Wish him a happy birthday over on twitter and he'll get your message directly.  Unfortunately, it's a teacher institute day at his school, so he won't get the joy of having students sing to him or embarrass him with guesses about how old they think he is all day long! ha ha!

4.20.2011

Tagxedo

Tagxedo is, in my opinion, a souped-up version of Wordle.  It takes words from pretty much anything (rss feeds, twitter, famous speeches, urls, etc) and turns them into word "clouds" with more frequently used words showing up larger.

Tagxedo is cool because you can change most of the options, including the shape of the final cloud!  Here, I made a Tagxedo from the Sandburg Art Blog:


Aww, I made it a heart shape, because I love art!  It is easy to save and print your Tagxedo without having to create any logins or users (which is really important to me when I'm working with students).  This site was really fun to play around with, and I hope to use it with students very soon as part of a cool new project!

4.18.2011

Sandburg at 60!


Guess what's coming up?  Sandburg Middle School is turning 60!  We're hosting a big community-wide celebration in honor of this milestone.  There will be a performance by the band, choir, and orchestra.  A school-wide art show with artwork from every student in art classes this year will be on display.  There will be cake, face-painting, and art activities to participate in!


This is a preview of the postcard that was created especially for the event.  Mr. Burgett's wife donated her graphic design skills to create this awesome logo and postcard layout for us.  She even designed a poster, which you'll soon see all over the school and at local businesses!

We're hoping to get Sandburg alumni, community members, parents, students, and staff together to honor our school and share memories about Sandburg.  I even have a special mural planned made up of puzzle pieces.  Visitors will have the opportunity to create individual pieces for the final puzzle, which will come together to form one giant art mural.  I'm pretty excited about it!

Hope to see you there!

4.13.2011

Hooray! I won stuff!


Exciting news!  Today I was visited by members of the Elmhurst 205 Foundation, and they awarded me with a super amazing huge grant!

I wrote a grant for a SMART Board and three iPads to use in the art room, and I was so happy and excited to find out that I had won!  It felt like winning the lottery!  I had almost forgotten about writing the grant, since it was way back in December.  My sixth graders were walking into the class as photos were being taken, so they were invited to take a photo of me and Principal Read along with our sign.  I'll post a photo here if I get a copy, because I bet it turned out pretty good.

I hope to order the new technology soon, but it won't be fully up and running until next school year.  Some of my current eighth graders were a little sad, but I promised they could try out the iPads if they show up before the summer.

Hooray!  I love exciting news!

4.12.2011

another reason to love teaching art

Every once in a while I'm grading papers, head down, chugging away at my work... not much going on.  Then it happens.  I spot something on a student artwork that makes me smile and giggle.  I can't help but have to share it with others.  This is one of those instances.

I was grading the sixth grade "Where the Wild Things Are" paintings and I spotted this crazy little guy cannon-balling off of a diving board in the background of Gillian's artwork.  I've circled it and pointed it out in the image below:


...and here's a close-up:


This little guy looks so happy in this picture, like "Whoopee!" as he hurls himself into the pale blue water below.  I love spotting little details like this.  It makes me smile, and it makes my day a little brighter.  I'm reminded what it's like to have the imagination of a sixth grader.

Thanks, Gillian.

p.s. A very special thank-you to everyone who voted in the Oak Park education referendum on April 5th.  Mr. Leban and I are very excited that he'll have a job next year, and that Oak Park K-8 schools will continue to have art classes!

3.25.2011

Student Art Show!


Today was the artist's reception for the Elmhurst Art Museum K-8 Art Exhibition.  We had lots of parents and families that came to see the artwork!  Check out these crowds!



I approve of this artwork!  Thanks to Ms. Liang, the art teacher from Bryan, for taking this photo of me.



More of our awesome student art on display.


Above, these are a couple of our star lanterns from 8th grade students.  Below, some more shots of the exhibit artwork.



The art show will be on display between now and April 9th, 2011.  I'm going to put all of our Sandburg artwork into a special display at our "Sandburg at 60" birthday celebration and fine arts exhibition on May 25th.  More on that show coming up soon!

Have a great Spring Break everyone!  See you all in a week!

3.21.2011

My Weekend Trip to the Comic Convention!


Over the weekend, Mr. Leban and I went to the C2E2 comic convention.  I'd never been to one before, and it was super fun.


Uglydolls had a booth there!  I pretty much chased down Ice Bat to get a photo with him.  I was pretty excited.


We saw artist Eric Maruscak drawing a gigantic chalk comic portrait using a grid drawing method.  If you look to his left, you can see that he has a printout of the image he's working on and he's drawn a grid over it to help him sketch out his design on such a large scale.


Here's a large overall view of how much he still has to go!  Phew!  No wonder he's gotten comfortable by taking his shoes off - he's gonna be here a while!


Mr. Leban and Darth Vader shake angry fists in defiance of those who deny the force!

What an adventure!  Did you do anything fun this weekend!


3.10.2011

Oak Park K-8 Art Show


I went to the Oak Park K-8 show at OPRF High School last night.  It was so cool to see the MASSIVE amounts of artwork on display from all of the schools!  Mr. Leban teaches at Brooks Middle School, so he let me tag along and eat some cookies.



Do you recognize the inspiration for these works of art?  They're Faith Ringgold, just like we do in sixth grade!


I really like these cool iPod-inspired paintings.  They give me ideas for some projects of our own!



The above two photos are from the display case where Mr. Leban's students work is located.  They create their own marble-maze games, make masks, cut out and design miniature model guitars, and even stretch their own canvas onto frames they build themselves!  How fun!



As you can see, the walls are really full!  I couldn't believe how many people showed up!




(I told Mr. Leban to allow me to take a photo as he ponders the artwork.)


Above, you can see just some of the awesome Oak Park K-8 art teachers that work in the district.  They're super friendly, they love what they do, and many of them have become my friends.  It's makes me sad that for many of them, their jobs depend on the referendum passing. Here's information from their district website on what programs will be cut: http://www.op97.org/referendum/Reductions-Information.pdf

3.07.2011

Oak Park Referendum


Most of you know that my husband is an art teacher in Oak Park.  His school district is trying to pass a referendum next month.  The bad news is that, if it does not pass, all of the art teachers from grades K-8 except for TWO will lose their jobs and there will be NO elementary art education at all.  Can you believe that?  In Oak Park?  Neither can I.


So, on Friday night the art teachers gathered together (they're nice enough to let me hang out with them!) and we made posters to display in community businesses.  The one above is Mr. Leban's, and the other three you see here are mine.  My apologies for the blurry photos - I took them with my cell phone.



Do you know anyone who lives in Oak Park?  Please share your support for the referendum with them, or pass along these other valuable resources: Vote Yes for Oak Park Schools (Facebook) and @referendumyes on Twitter.
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