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