Art in the classroom

Award-winning Art Educator and Speaker featured in Scholastic, IncredibleArt, Homeschool Top 100, Family Friendly HQ, Artastic, Metrowest, The Sun, and more!

In an era of high stakes testing, art is sometimes the first thing to go but we as teachers need to find ways to continue providing art experiences for our students. Not only is art just plain fun, and let's face it, kids do need fun, but it's much more than that. Art is beneficial in so many ways! Find out ways to incorporate art in this post by The Teacher Next Door.

Spring is finally here! I love finding ways to integrate art into content areas such as language arts and math. I cannot think of a better project to welcome spring than by creating echo art flowers through a directed drawing exercise. After completing our flowers, we measured with paperclips since we are working on measurement this week. Each student added a sentence under their artwork that stated how many paperclips tall their flowers were. These flowers definitely make an awesome…

Student self-portraits using watercolor are a great first week of school activity. It's also a fun project to repeat at the end of the school year. Read all about how to use this fun idea in the classroom.

I'm finally back from maternity leave and ready to teach (kinda)! Can I bring my baby with me? Can he be my assistant? No? Awe. :( Towards the end of the last school year, I came back from my maternity leave early so that I could work the two days of post-planning. I decided it would be best if I were the one to clean up and put away my classroom, so I’d know where everything was when I officially returned. Last school year, we had to take EVERYTHING off of the walls so that our custodial…

Our Mondrian Art Project for Kids is perfect to teach art in the classroom. It's easy and free! Kids will love their Mondrian masterpiece & will proudly display their beautiful artwork on glass.

Art projects that are fun for kids and bring in big bucks for your school auction!

Summer is almost over! How did that happen? Where did the last 2 months go? With a little under 2 weeks left until we go back to school my mind has been increasingly drawn to planning for the ne…

Today I'm sharing one of my favourite tasks for building community in the classroom. Students are able to share an important aspect of themselves (the story of their name) with the class and with me, their teacher. Through this task we are also working on important skills, like reading comprehension, writing, and reflection. Day 1 To begin, I asked my students to write any name they wish they had on a sticky note. They then placed it in a mason jar. I read my class the story "The Name Jar"…