Do you like Cake and Pizza?

The school that I work for is doing a fundraiser, because we do not have enough money. Not even enough to buy the art teacher supplies :(

If you would like to help our school and the Art Department please buy some Claire's Gourmet.
the website is:
http://www.clairesgourmet.com/

our schools # 002215 (you will need this at the home page)

If you order online, your products will be shipped to your home!

Good food for a great cause.

Thank you for supporting the Baltimore City Schools and fine arts.

Inspiring

My students inspire me every day.

Rhythmic line drawing

Relief printmaking

Keith Haring inspired drawing

Relief printmaking

Amazing

I have an amazing 6th grade student. The first day of art he drew this for drill:

He is eleven and amazing!

I have been a bad blogger :(

I have been a very bad blogger, sorry. I was keeping up with posting until January. Life gets busy sometimes.

So I have started my second year teaching in a middle/high school, and my 5th year teaching in Baltimore City Public Schools. Last time I posted I was working on my tables. Before the year started I repainted the tables in my classroom. I am now color coordinated and can call my tables to line up by color. I also have learned how to sign the colors and table and line up, so my hearing impaired classes can understand too. I find I am able to stay much more organized. I have each class to a drill/warm-up the first 10 minutes of class. Now instead of collecting the drills from each student, I have a folder on each table. The red table has a red folder; the purple table has a purple folder, etc. So collecting and passing out drills is so much quicker and leaves us with more instruction and work time. Yea!

Principles of Design

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Principles of Design

View more presentations from erinsmith.art.

PD, da best!

Have I mentioned before that I love Professional Development? I think I have, last week was awesome. We had a snow day, or should I say ice day on Wednesday. Thursday and Friday were professional development days. I have been looking forward to these days for a while because the tables in my classroom looked awful. They had been graffitied for years, then the former art teacher painted them light blue. When the students were using the tables the blue paint began to peel. When the paint was wet, it bubbled and peeled even more. I barely have time to keep up with my lessons, and writing essential questions on the board, never had time to scrape and paint my tables. So I finally did it! On Thursday I scraped the blue paint off, my arms are still sore. On Friday, after my fabulous ceramics PD, I sanded and primed and painted the tables gray. They look so much nicer. We will see how long this lasts. If the paint doesn't peel, I will tint the same paint black and paint all the tables black. Black is difficult to graffiti on. If this paint peels again I will screw Masonite on the tops and router the edges.

These are the before pictures:

Later in the week I will post an updated picture.

Inauguration

We (My dad, step mom, Little Blue, Zeek, and I) Went to the inauguration! All the adults had an amazing day. We soaked up all the optimism and smiling millions. Little Blue said "This is the worst day ever!" We did walk a few miles. Zeek said, "I thought you said this was going to be exciting!" We had to walk farther than expected because the metro shut down because a woman fell on the tracks (she is ok by the way). So Little Blue cried a lot. During the ceremony she kept crying and asking, "where is Barack Obama? I thought we were going to see Barack Obama." Yes she really used his full name.

The pictures above are many walking thru the 3rd street tunnel, and when we made it to the mall. Many spectators were in the trees, and sitting on top of the Porta-potties.

After an hour or so of crying and making me feel like the most irresponsible parent by bringing her small children to a freezing event, they found their second wind and were skipping around the mall. We went into the Air and Space museum to warm up, with a few hundred other spectators, and the kids got to have some "fun". We were very impressed with how easy it was to get there and the amount of soldiers helping. For a gathering with two million or so people, everything went smooth.

I will include some pictures, but if you know me then you know my Step Mom's blog. She has some great images of screaming Little Blue.

Little Blue

January has been quite eventful. First Little Blue had her 6th b-day! Grandma and Papa came to visit and we threw her a winter wonderland tea party. I think I might have had more fun than Little Blue!

Audit Time

Our school is having its annual audit. Those of you that teach in BCPSS are familiar with the week of the audit. Lots of pop in visits to make sure all your information is written on boards, students are engaged, and your environment is inviting. I passed my inspection today from my school admin team. My inspection report said nice positive things like, "good use of the explicit teaching model" and "your room is so clean and inviting". Its nice to be noticed for the good things :)

*(At my old school they never even checked my room, so they didn't even know that I had a clean inviting environment, or that I used the explicit teaching model the way they requested.)

Is it January?

Can it be, we have to go back to school? I am anxious and nervous, and I love my job! Why do we feel this way? Do we not have enough breaks? Are our breaks too long?
I don't know the answer but every teacher I know is anxious to go back to work.