Kindergarten ladybugs! #gearingupfortheartshow

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Fall Fest Mural

I had the opportunity to paint a road mural for our community's Fall Festival.  I had 9 juniors and seniors spend a day out of the classroom and work flawlessly together to create this mural.  We started at about 8:45am with a circle.  A few students sketched out the rest with chalk.  When the lines were complete everyone grabbed a brush and paint and just got to work.  We made multiple trips to the hardware store for more gallons of paint and brushes!  When 2:30 rolled around we were putting finish touches on and taking a group photo.  It was an AWESOME experience and we had so many positive compliments from the community!   

Kandinsky inspired trees for my first graders! #sharpiespaintandpaper #gearingupfortheartshow by sharpiespaintandpaper

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Kandinsky inspired trees for my first graders! #sharpiespaintandpaper #gearingupfortheartshow

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We used over 500 CD's.

This was quite the process, but well worth it!  It was WAY more time consuming than the bottle cap mural!  This mural was made out of recycled CD's, acrylic paint, and construction adhesive.  First, students broke the CD's into pieces, and then we painted them with acrylic paint.  Finally, we placed them over a 8'x7', black primed, 1/2" sheet of birch wood.  We made sure there was a small space in-between each piece so it looked like a mosaic in the end.  After everything was laid out and looked good, we glued each individual piece down.  I know in this photo the words are hard to read, but it says, "Be the change you want to see in the world."

Snowmen and Penguins!

This is it, this is the end of the winter projects for 3rd and 1st grade.  

I'm ready to melt the snow and warm this place up!

Here are simple tissue paper snowmen made by 1st grade.

Below are penguins made by 3rd grade.

I could use some advice!

I only have my middle school students for nine weeks at a time.  Combined with my typical students I have a different special needs class each nine weeks.  On different occasions I've had to address and discipline students for bullying or making comments to/about my special needs students.  I've been struggling to get some of my students to understand that we are not all equipped with the same abilities.    

So for one day while I introduced a new lesson, I had my typical students wear different things to challenge their abilities.  For example, some students wore vaseline covered goggles to blur their vision.  Others wore oversized gloves to challenge their fine motor skills.  The rest of the students taped their dominate drawing hand and drew with their non-dominate hand.  The entire class period we worked like this on our new project.  Many students were frustrated that they couldn't make their project look as good as they knew it could.  Comments like, "I hate this." or "I can't do this." were heard many times.  I would just remind them that they, after the class was over, could take off what they were wearing and be back to "normal".  The other students in the class were born this way and couldn't just take it off when class was over.  This lesson wasn't life changing, but it did change the respect that my students had towards one another for the rest of the nine weeks.  If anyone out there has any suggestions on how to approach a situation like this in the future I'd love to hear your advice!