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Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Back to School and Time to Re-arrange

Everyone is getting ready to go back to school, my husband to teach 11th grade AP English and Thesis, my kids, and myself. I told you about my part-time job teaching Spanish 4 hours a week at a Montessori school. I have not told you that I have a full-time job as a Computer Science Professor. Since having my children, I only teach at a distance(on-line). This has allowed me to stay at home as much as possible with my children through their early years. My son, almost five, will be attending a Catholic Montessori school four days a week and my daughter, almost 3, will attend 3 days a week.

My husband has been busy getting his classroom ready, we have both been volunteering at my sons school with cleaning, painting, and helping with whatever the teachers need, I have been busy getting my virtual classes ready, and I am also re-arranging our home learning environment.

Today I re-arranged the Art Shelves. I do this regularly to keep the interest high. It is amazing how quickly the kids notice any small change I have made. This change was a lot bigger.















This is the art shelve. I change one thing on the shelve weekly. It could be the paint colors, swap an activity that has not been used in a while or change the collage items or paper colors. There are two activities considered 'art' that I have on a different shelf. Playdough and Cutting work.
















On the top shelf is a book in Spanish titled "Let's Draw Animals". It teaches step by step how to draw many different animals. I will be teaching my 4 year old how to trace. On the top shelf I also have paints and paint brushes. This never leaves the shelf as my kids LOVE to paint. I did add one new brush (the sponge one with the red handle).
















The second shelf has stamps, stamp pads, paper, and colored pencils to color the stamps. Now that I look at this, I am going to place the cutting work next to this since it is a very thin long basket.
















The last shelf has a tray with collage items (pom-poms, stickers, small punch outs, and pieces of construction paper). Next to it is colored construction paper and a glue bottle and a glue stick. I like the collage work on colored paper so the kids can see the glue. White glue on white paper does not work for my 2 year old!

The next shelve I am working on is the Spanish Language shelve. It will be a few days before I post on that.

I got my ideas from here and here.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your art shelf looks great. Isn't blogging great? I can't believe this, actually, since you got one of your ideas from my blog, but I never thought to set up an art shelf like that at home. I have art supplies readily available at all times, but I don't have the projects set up like that. I am definitely going to do that!! Thanks for the inspiration!!

Gigi said...

Hi Laura,

Thank you! I love to know I inspire others like others inspire me with their blogs!

By the way, I am looking for a teacher blog at the Elementary Level, like yours but for ages 6-9. If you know of any or run across one, let me know! As I do my training, I am keeping an idea notebook for the day I get a classroom!
I have found one: The Learning Ark

Thank you! Ginnette

N from the Learning Ark said...

Great art area! I have been meaning to set up a stamp activity for Little-N you just made it so much easier for me.
Thanks
N

Gigi said...

Thank you N! I barely had this done and my 2 year old got the collage work out and made her a masterpiece!
She loves the glue :-)
Ginnette