Sketchbooks 2.0

I have finally gotten my act together and I've made a sample sketchbook.  This is the type I will be using for Kindergarten and 1st grade.  It's small, and easy to make FOR the kids. 

I just made a plain old little book, with card stock for the cover.  I trimmed the copy paper inside to be 8.5 x 10.5 or thereabouts, just to make sure the cover hung over the edges a little bit.

Our workroom has one of these fascinating devices which I am honestly in love with at the moment.  It's called a saddle stapler.  I'd never heard of it until moments ago.  Apparently you can put the folded book over the arch and staple into the crease without bending the staple!

See it.  Love it.

I think it will be very easy to make a million of these for the littles, and I might even decide to make them for the big kids next year, if all goes well.  Right now the big kids are using their brad-folders with blank paper inside as their sketchbooks.  But I feel like those will be harder to use for drawing, since they won't lay flat.  Ideally, I would like to have all the books spiral bound but I suppose that's dreaming...since I don't have anybody to help me do that, and they would all be huge when we were done.

Even though I love my red Swingline stapler, it isn't really up to this task.

I'll let you know how things go!  My plan is to have all the sketchbooks made by the end of the next class rotation, and have all the kids ready to draw in them ASAP.  I want to start the year with a Zentangle lesson so they will all have some go-to art activity when they finish things or when I have a sub.



Sketchbooks

So every year I try to refine and perfect things I messed up the year before.  Don't we all?  Last year, due to the sheer numbers of kids I had, some of them never actually got the lovely "art journal" packets I made.  New kids came and went, and every time a new kid showed up, I had to run off another packet.  Our copier is in use all the time, and I never seemed to be able to get in there to get that done.  So my solution is this:  Blank pages!  Yes, instead of art journals with tons of....ok let's face it...they were worksheets...My kids will have a sketchbook.  This is where I'll have them do thumbnail sketches, and when they are finished with the day's work they can choose a sketchbook prompt from the board, or from a list I'll print off.  I anticipated confusion, but when I said the word "sketchbook" today for the first time, there were plenty of positive responses from the kiddos. 

Let it be known, I am not a big fan at all of free draw in my class.  The kids tend to waste paper, and leave a mess, and even rush through the project so that they can draw whatever they want.  That's not ok.  They're supposed to be doing their best work all the time,  right?

I usually take the recycled paper from the workroom and let the kids use the blank side for free draw.  This is what

my free draw center looks like pretty much every day.  Tiki Man is angry.

So I just hole punched a pile of white copier paper and had each kid take 10 pages for now, and put them in the brad folders they were supposed to bring to class.  Today I only had time to give one class a sketchbook prompt.  Some of them sat and thought for a long time about it.  I told them it's ok to write in your sketchbook instead of draw.  It's for saving ideas.  So if they are pictures or words, it doesn't matter.  Studies have shown that working consistently in a sketchbook can help improve literacy.  Seriously.  That's what I read.  Somewhere.  I wish I could link you. 

Now I need a nice, organized way to store them.  I had been using colored file boxes, but they are really too small and tore up easily.  I need some rubbermaids, or maybe a shelf system.  If you use sketchbooks with elementary kids, what do you do?  Do you give prompts, or let them just draw and collage freely?  I'd really like to know.  This is something I hope I can be consistently utilizing rather than free draw or busywork.

Have a great start to the year!

The Value of...

So I'd been struggling coming up with a lesson about value for 1st grade, and I decided, what they hey, we'll look at Chuck close and make some thumbprints. Well, they love it! This was really just a practice lesson but they are actually following the concept, and it only takes one day. I would like to have this turn into something more long-term, worth hanging on the fridge at home, but I'm still workin on that. I just gave each table a large stamp pad and told them to stamp once after putting their finger in the ink, then stamp again and again without putting their finger back in the ink. The result was a 1st grade style Value Scale!

Also, the 2nd Grade Chihuly- Inspired sculpture turned out great. So great in fact that one of the PTO volunteers asked if it could go in the silent auction in December. But I have bad news. Somebody broke it. :( So now it's in several large pieces that I will have to work some hot glue gun magic on in the next few weeks. But here's a photo of what it looked like while it lasted. If I'd had a string of white Christmas lights to put inside instead of the single light bulb, I think that might have looked better. Hindsight is 20/20 as they say.