Edgar Degas for Grade 1 and 6

On top of teaching basic French to students in grades 4 through 6 I had a few periods a cycle of coverage. Usually the teachers just asked me to do whatever I wanted with them and what I wanted to do with them was art. So we did art!

You may remember many years ago when I did some Edgar Degas art with my grade 4 class. I remembered getting oodles of compliments on the art (why I got the compliments is beyond me... my art was not up on the wall!) but they had difficulty making the actual tin foil people. So this past year I did it with my grade 6 class and there was a lot less trouble with the couple of additional years.

I had one bulletin board in the front lobby to use as mine for whatever I wanted and so I often had students art up on there. The problem was I often was teaching more than one art class at a time.

Here's a great example of how I had 2 very different grades (grade 1's and 6's) study the same artist (Edgar Degas) but do art that was appropriate to their age level. The grade 1's did the ballerina's (which very few actually grumbled about) and the grade 6's did the tin foil pieces and they all went up on the same bulletin board.

Ta Da!

The process was pretty simple. I Always, always, ALWAYS started off all my classes with the lower grades with a book... I think I found a couple of fictional books from the library that had ballerinas in them. So I read those to them.

Then I showed them what we were going to be doing on Artolazzi and we all practiced our best ballerina pose.

We had already dyed the coffee filters in a previous class (just use washable markers and a spritz bottle... we couldn't do them the day we were doing the rest of the project because they would be wet. I didn't make any colour suggestions or anything... they did whatever they wanted.

For the art the first thing we did was glue down the ballerina's skirt. This helped them to draw the body proportional to the skirt. Then they did the drawing of the person and making a background. 

It was perfect and lovely and quick and easy. Perfect for first graders!

French classroom Before*During*After

Now that summer is basically done why not show you a picture of my fabulous French classroom. 

This was what I walked into... yes the picture is a little skewed BUT the classroom is actually very large.

Here's what it looked like after I put all my fabulous touches in it

And here is what it looked like at the end of the school year

Yikes! What happened you ask!?!

The school was doing a big reshuffling of classrooms to put them in an order/location that made more sense. And... they were actually getting rid of the French room altogether. Well, they weren't getting rid of the physical classroom... how odd would have that been considering it was in the middle of the school. They just weren't having a room for French any longer because classroom teachers were going to teach their own French the following year. This meant that the wall that my white boards were on was coming down to give my next door neighbour a MASSIVE classroom (which is pretty much the size of all the classrooms... lucky kids get to really spread out at that school!). Because of the big reshuffling they needed somewhere to store everyone's stuff and well... my lovely room became the dumping ground for all things to be moved and all things to be garbaged. Lovely.

The nice part of all of this was that I certainly couldn't teach in a room that looked like this... could I?

So from about the 2 week mark before school let out I started teaching from the students classrooms (or the library in some cases) which meant we played a lot of bingo or watched movies in French (with English subtitles)... which gets a lot less complaints than you may think. This also meant that I could take down all my stuff from the walls and pack up my classroom 2 weeks before school let out. 

Let's just say on the last day when everyone else was making lists of stuff to do over the summer and scrambling to get stuff put away I was sitting back with my feet up and my bowl of bonbons (or maybe I was helping them clean up and reminding them that I was on the sub list for next year)

Remember when....

Remember when I thought I would definitely be able to manage my half time teaching position and post here at the same time?  Remember how that didn't happen at all?

*crickets*... is anyone still here??

Well guess what folks!?!  I'm back on the subbing lists as of right now (but maybe, just maybe the right position for me will still come up before the school year starts... we've still got just over 2 weeks to go after all)!  But even if that right job doesn't come up I'm excited for my triumphant return to subbing.  

What's coming down the pipe on this lovely blog?  

I've got pictures of my French classroom!

I've got lots of art ideas!

And hopefully once I start subbing I'll have some wonderfully hilarious stories to share!

Stay tuned... stuff is coming.