I've moved my blog

Hello Everyone,


I just wanted to let you know that I have moved my blog over to Wordpress. You can find it here: https://schmidty77.wordpress.com/  Please check it out for tips and ideas on teaching art, Design and Technology and my views/ideas on teaching in general. Don't forget to drop me a message.
Happy Teaching!!!!

Understanding newborn babies.

I came across this link and as a new dad found this helpful so I thought I'd share it. Priscilla Dunstan is a baby expert that seems to have cracked the baby language. She was featured on Oprah and this is the link to the YouTube video that describes the five sounds a baby makes and what those sounds mean. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PgkZf6jVdVg

I personally found this video very helpful. 

Enjoy and I hope it makes your lives a little bit easier. 

Mark

Perspective Architecture Drawing With Hundertwasser Influence

This year I decided to slightly change my perspective drawing with my yr 7 students. I decided to make all 4 drawings into a single A3 study sheet. I thought I'd try this 7 week project this way in order for students to be able to track and see their progress over time more clearly. We started the project by working on the title and looking at a brief PowerPoint on different types of buildings. The title being Architecture which naturally lead to the discussion of what is an architect? To which the PowerPoint of the many different types of buildings throughout the world came in useful to discuss these terms.

The following lesson then focused on the students drawing skills. I always begin by showing my one point perspective PowerPoint (http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/One-Point-Perspective-draw-along-tutorial-power-point) discussing the different types of views and types of perspectives. When showing the slide of student drawings I tend to ask my students if they think they can draw that good. Sometimes one or two will raise their hands. Most will think they can't draw very well. However by the end of this project when I ask the same question again many are pleasantly surprised on what they have learnt and were able to accomplish. 

The one point perspective drawing I often start by doing a mind map on the back of he A3 paper to get students use to the terminology and thinking about perspective. This is done in conjunction with the one point perspective PowerPoint mentioned above. Next I have the students divide their page into 4 sections. Then I begin the one point perspective drawing in the top left box and use the PowerPoint to walk the students though it. This drawing usually takes a couple of lessons to complete. I try not to let the student get distracted by trying to draw random things in their cityscape but rather to stick to the rules of one point perspective drawing. 

Once that is complete I then use the two point perspective PowerPoint to start the next drawing below the one point drawing. I find this drawing tends to go much quicker as the students understand the steps to complete process and I often find some students rushing through this drawing. Towards the end of this drawing I teach students how to break the rules by drawing circles and organic forms by first putting everything into a box that is in perspective. Students find this interesting tend to be very engaged. 

Next drawing in the top right I get the students to think about what their hometown might be like in the future. I then have them choose which type of perspective they liked the most (either one or two point) and have them then begin drawing their futuristic cityscape. I encourage them part way through this drawing to get up, walk around and have a look at others drawings to get an idea they might borrow for their own. 

Once the drawing is complete I then show them a brief PowerPoint based on the work of the artist/architect Hundertwasser. I get the students talking about his use of colour and shapes. I then have them begin adding colour into their futuristic drawings in the style of Hundertwasser. 

The final empty box in the bottom right corner I use for annotation. I provide a guide for students to use  in order to help them reflect upon what they have learnt and tie all of their drawings together with an artist. Below are some of the examples of this years drawings. I hope you enjoy and find these useful for your students. 

Mark 

Teaching children to read before school. Brillkids!

This post is a bit different to most of my others but it is still educational based. All of my other posts have been about my experiences teaching art at a secondary school level and the resources that I use. This post however, is about an experience I am soon going to start and my initial thoughts about it.
In a short two months I'm about to become a

Learning Diaries Part II

Howdy,

I just wanted to give a brief update to my previous post. I have been using the learning diaries with my year 9 students on their low relief sculpture projects for about 4 weeks now.

KwikSurveys: Free online survey & questionnaire tool

Hello All,
I am reaching out to this helpful community of Educational Professionals in hopes of getting some reponses to help me further my Masters Thesis on Exchange Programmes and their impact on students, schools and the community. It is a short 15 question survey which should take approximately 7 minutes. I would very much appreciate your help. If you would like to discuss this further I would be glad to hear from anyone whom has researched this already or whom has delivered a programme like this in their own schools.
Thanks
Mark
http://kwiksurveys.com/s.asp?sid=q37f8ryxiqvxkwu97941

Learning diaries

I just wanted to share with you my thoughts about learning diaries and my intended use in my upcoming project with my yr.9 art class to record their progress throughout.
Here is a link to

Pop Art Scheme of Work

This is a six week scheme of work I did with my yr. 9 students (13 year olds) based on the Pop Art movement. This is just before they start their GCSE's. I found this project to engage and capture the imagination of my students. Many of them eagerly took their work home to develop and often asked what more they could do. It was a pleasure to teach this unit and the students learnt much.
We started with a power point presentation where students created a mind map and title for their study sheets based on pop art imagery and history. After that they began their large artist copy (Roy Lichtenstein, I gave the students a choice of three different works to lit the choice and put the emphasis of the work back onto honing their skills with the materials.) YouTube videos discussing pop art, a recorded auction of Lichtenstein's work and a couple videos displaying pop art techniques also helped to grab the students attention and move them forward in their work.
The project concluded with the students annotating their own work, discussing what went well what they could have improved, all the while reflecting upon what they had learnt.
Next the students will be looking at the artist Diane McLellan, a pop art food artist to which they will develop their low relief sculpture techniques.
Overall, I was quite impressed with the students work seen here in this post. I am thinking about putting some of the resources in my store for purchase by was wondering what others may think about the work, and see if other art teachers would be interested in something like this?
I hope you've enjoyed the read and I look forward to hearing from you.
Mark

Students Writing About Their Own Artwork

Today i did a bit of an experiment to see how my students interacted with sentence starters when writing about their own artwork. I have templates made for all of my projects, some generic and some a bit more specific to the given project. Regardless all of the templates give the students guidance in how they should be thinking about their projects. For example, a question from one of my handouts would be:
"In this piece I used ...........( name the media used)................... Because......."

My first group I had write out sentences in full on a separate lined paper and use the key words below to help them answer the questions.
My second group I had them use the key words to just fill in the handout directly.
When comparing the answers I noticed more students from my second group had a greater number of incorrect answers than the first who wrote the answers in full sentences. I also realised that my first group took longer to complete the writing than I expected. I am assuming the writing in full sentences has a big part of this but I also think that the students took their time to accurately read and answer the questions thoroughly. In the future I will have my students write out their answers in full (rough) before I check/ correct it and then have them rewrite on their study sheets in good.
I hope this helps with any others and if you have any other tips or tricks I'd like to hear from you.
Most of my sentence starters can be found in my store: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Annotations-and-writing-frames-for-drawings-sculpture-and-more

Thanks
Mark

Sea Life Art Project (sculpture)

What would your students think if you were to turn your classroom (or a section of it) into a submarine portal looking out onto a vast array of sea life and extrordinary creatures?

Drawing Tonal Starter for Tonal Drawings

I just wanted to share a teaching resource that has had a large impact upon the way I teach KS4 (14-16 year old students)drawing, more specifically tonal studies and the way my students learn. This teaching resource can be found here: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Mark-Schmidt as a freebie. It's called

Another One Point Perspective Tutorial

Looking to boost students abilities and self-esteem in drawing?
Want students to produce a high quality outcome?

I have found being able to show students and have them follow along line by line when drawing increases their self-confidence and allow them to achieve a higher quality outcome. It has also given me more time to go around and give selected students more guidance when drawing, showing them the proper techniques and guidance on the rules of perspective.

I have found that students have even gone home and tried drawing in perspective because they felt enabled. If students have a good time doing something and feel that they can achieve a quality outcome in, they will be much more focused in lessons and keen to show others. For me this project is about building confidence. Yes, learning to draw in perspective is good as well but I feel enabling students is worth much more.

This is why I have created my second follow along, line by line, one point perspective power point. Please check out the power point here:
www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/One-Point-Perspective-Bedroom-Step-by-Step-Draw-Along

More details about how to use this power point and how to take it further can be found in the above link. One perspective drawing can also be found in the link.

Thanks for viewing and I look forward to hearing about how this power point has impacted your students.

Thanks
Mark

Video by students for exchange trip fundraising

I'm so proud of my students preparing to go on thier exchange to Canada to perform drama pieces in a festival. They have raise half of their target funding and are pushing towards the rest. They have just released a brief video attached to their crowdfunding pitch.
Please have a visit and share this link with many others.
http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/investment/artistic-exchange-1083

Thanks
Mark

Rule of Thirds Power Point

Do your art students draw very small?
Do they draw directly in the centre of their page every time?
Want to know how to help them create interesting compositions?

I just wanted to share my latest resource called 'The Rule of Thirds'. It's designed as a power point with a printable drawing guide and a lesson plan ready for you to tailor with your specific classes names. http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Rule-of-Thirds-Power-Point-for-Drawing-and-Understanding-Composition

The idea is to get students starting to think about where they position their subjects when drawing. Using the Rule of Thirds to help break up the page and allow students to find the points of interest will enable them to structures their pictures in a more creative way. We all know that one success will lead to another and soon the students will be exploring more complex compositions.

Anyway, I hope this power point on the Rule of Thirds helps and I look forward to hearing how this has helped your teaching in your art classes.

Mark

Canada - UK Arts Exchange

Hello Everyone,

I'm quite excited to announce the culmination of the last three months of hard work and long meetings. Below is a fund raising website to raise funds for two students from my school to participate in an arts festival in Canada. Therefore it is an international exchange between schools from Canada and the UK.
http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/investment/artistic-exchange-1083

Please have a browse of the website to find

Making Phone Calls Home!

Howdy,

I am looking at tracking my phone calls home this year digitally. We all know how important it is to make phone calls home to parents about behaviour (both positive and negative, but I really can't stress how important those positive phone calls can be) and to log or keep track of them. New teachers may ask here why? me keep track of calls I make even if they are positive?
Yes for a number of reasons. It shows you have been making regular contact with parents and it could also save your butt one day ( I hope it never goes there). What I mean is:

• What if a student or parent accuses you of not making a phone call home to let know about the progress of their child?
• What if you need to recall a specific phone call to a parent?
• How many times are you going to call a parent regarding a particular student in your lesson before taking the matter further?
• How will you prove to your line manager that you have made very effort possible to provide for a student

These are just a few issues that I have had to deal with so far in my teaching career. Keeping records of phone calls home to students is something I started early on in my career and has helped me out a couple of times thus far. If you aren't recording your calls you might want to think about it.
I have included in this post a link (hopefully it works) to a simple but straight forward excel spreadsheet that I am going to be using this year to track my phone calls. There are prompts in it to help make it a bit easier imputing the information. Here is the link http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Call-Log
I will take you to my TpT website to where you can download it for free. Feel free to have a browse of some of my other teaching resources while you are there.

If you would like to make that excel spread a bit more user friendly here is a slight modification you can do. It adds drop down menus from two columns that should make imputing data a bit easier on you.
Step 1 - open document and click on sheet 2 in the bottom left corner
Step 2 - click on the first blank space under 'Reason' 
Step 3 - click on the 'Data' tab across the top of the page
Step 4 - click on 'Data Validation' and a little screen will pop up
Step 5 - in the drop down menu where it says 'Allow' select 'List'
Step 6 - click in the blank box labelled 'Source' (it should have just popped up)
Step 7 - click on sheet 1 tab in bottom left
Step 8 - click and drag under the heading 'Reason' to highlight the text. You should notice that the 'Source box has now been filled with your selection from the highlighted source. Click 'OK' and you are finished. Under your sheet 2 you should now have a drop down menu with selected options for you to select. This should make your phone calls go a bit quicker. You can also do the same for the heading 'Reaction'.

I hope you enjoy this product and it works well for you. Let me know if you have any suggestions for improvements or how it helps you.

Mark

Let me know how this works for you

First Day Of School

Well school is only a week away from starting again. I use to get excited and look forward to going back to school when I was a student even though I was nervous about it. Funny enough it is still the same today. Standing on the other side (teacher) I have to admit that I look forward to going back to school to teach and work with students but I am always very nervous the first couple of weeks. I guess it is the unexpected that makes me feel this way. What will my students be like this year? What is my room going to look like? How am I going to

Fundraising in Schools (part 2)

An update from a previous post about fund raising for school projects.
Are group of teachers, students, volunteers and community sponsors have been working very hard to setup a funding platform and gather resources to support two students to partake in an Arts based exchange programme. We have just gone through the application process for the crowd funder web fund raising site. We didn't get approved at first and had to resubmit more information. We were then approved. However, because of the summer break

Is Wikipedia a scholarly tool for students?

The word Wikipedia for me as a teacher has always seemed untrustworthy. Upon reading this article http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/education/article/1230732--wikipedia-course-gets-students-research-online I may have to rethink how I talk about Wikipedia with my students. I'm still not sure I'll be able to fully trust it but it could make a good starting point for research based projects. Me personally, I prefer and recommend Google scholar when doing research. Regardless I'd be interested to hear what others think of and how you use or don't use Wikipedia in your classrooms.

Fundraising in Schools

I have taken a month off from writing any blog posts to focus on my preparing,teaching, marking of my classes and researching/ writing for my module of my MA course in continuing professional development. Secondly, I have been researching fundraising opportunities as I am helping to promote and establish an exchange programme between my school and a Canadian school based in the arts. For example, last year was the first year it took place and providing we can find the money this will be the second. The idea is to have two from each swap countries and perform/ show their artistic talents abroad. It builds their self esteem and gives them a focus. Possibly even contacts that they could use in the future if they decide to make a career out of it. Along with selecting the best possible candidate from a series of interviews, auditions and behaviour reports we try to select the students that would best represent the school and that might not other words be able to afford something like this. Right enough about the background information as the blog suggests this post is about fundraising not a programme I'm trying to organise an run. (if you want to know more info about thi though feel free to message me). I've come across a couple of Internet sites that really seem to be changing the way in which fundraising occurs.
Ok yes there are still the typical bake sales and raffles within schools but to fund a larger program you need to think bigger. Asking local corporations for money an getting the local newspaper on your side is always a good thing. However, in times like these(slow economic growth/recession) there tends not to be a lot of money in these areas. Local and county boroughs (government) have some money available. Again not much but worth applying for. The newest way of fundraising to which I don't have much experience but am going through the process of are with websites such as www.crowdfunder.co.uk (UK based) www.kickstarter.com (American based but expanding)and www.indiegogo.com

These sites seem to really work off of social networking sites along with own media promotions to expose people, schools, businesses looking for capital to an international group of generous people looking to promote and develop worth while causes. Again I dont know much more about these sites as of yet but will be updating as I go through this process. Initially these sites look very interesting. Go check them out!

Also I thought I'd include a link to the Canadian festival website in case anyone would like to look into this a bit further. www.riverartsfestival.ca

If you have used one of these sites in the past to fundraise and would like to suggest ideas to make a "pitch" successful please post.

ThanksMark