Good beginning ideas for an art teacher

This is my fourth year teaching art, and I have expanded/grown every year. I started with just the K-2 room and concentrated on a  lot of seasonal crafty things. Each year I added another classroom and now I teach all the grades K-6 in three rooms.

 I still plan on doing seasonal crafty things for the kinders. My life is actually easier for that group since I can recycle the best of the last three years for them since they have the room all to themselves and they are all new to me!  Yeah, the archive of work is now paying off!

For the 1-4th room and the 5-6th room, I plan on doing a much tighter curriculum of things. This first week and for the rest of the year I plan on emphasizing the main elements of art: Line, Shape, Form, Space, Texture, Color and Value.  I then hope to keep doing historical artists and a lesson based on them, as well as lessons based on techniques, like watercolor, pastel, sculpture, printmaking, spriknled with a few seasonal or craft items.

Here is a great site by the Getty Center with some nice starter curriclum about the Main elements of art.
Elements of Art from Getty Museum

Here is a very good site for breaking down Art History
http://www.smarthistory.org

Getting ready for School

It's begining to feel a bit Autumnal, and eventhough many public schools started a week or two ago, our little school starts Thurs. Sept. 1. That means that I'm getting my art ideas ready!  Luckily, I can look back on this blog and remember what projects worked best and do some recycling of the "Best of..." projects.

This year I will be teaching the 10 kindergarteners in Mrs. Dillon's room every week for 30+ minutes. Then as a change, I will be alternating the two older rooms (10 first-fourth graders, and 15 fifth/sixth) every other week. But instead of 30 minutes each week, I'll do an hour, so they will get roughly the same amount of time, but I'll be able to go into more detail and they will have more time.

As it was last year, I avoided really messy projects, knowing I had such a short time and also had to move my show into the next room right after the first class.