During these last April holidays the junior school held Professional Learning days for the staff, part of which included a session with me for each planning team. Teams were asked to narrow their Visual Art focus for the upcoming term and identify some key areas that they would like support with. Some teams just enjoyed sitting and talking about the broad ideas and myriad of possibilities, issues they have had around work-flow or resource management. Others came with specific wishes and got stuck straight into creating teacher models for their upcoming lessons.

The Year 1 team worked on landscape paintings in the style of Van Gogh. By using a simple perspective layout and 'dabbing' paint technique, they completed effective exemplars for their students. Well done Year 1 teachers. I will load the video tutorial for this model onto our Videos page soon. 

Our Year 2 team had a weather focus and spent their session creating winter landscapes in paint or torn paper. Such a great way to explore colour graduation and space. I will load the video tutorial for this model onto our Videos page soon. Click on the link at the top of the page. 

I am in the process of arranging with my school to open workshops up to classroom teachers from local schools on Auckland's North Shore. Looking at morning sessions from 9:30 - 12:00 in the September school holidays. If this is of interest to you, please comment on this post.

Late last year, in preparation for the junior school Art Show, I ran the following staff workshop in Visual Art. The aim was for each planning/teaching/admin team to produce a painted canvas that could be hung in the upcoming Art Show. Through the specialist Visual Arts programme I had focused on the element of Line with my students, during the year and wished to extend on this learning with their teachers. 

During the preliminary meeting, each team was asked to do a google images search using the following terms:
doodles, zendoodles, zentangles.
This helped them become familiar with this current trend in the art world.
Teachers were then asked to brain storm the significant events in their teaching year to date, unique to their teams. Each member of the team selected some of these ideas and added them to the original search terms, e.g zendoodle + fish or zendoodle + butterflies

Teachers were encouraged to do observational drawings of their favourite images found, using paper and pencil.

After some time, the teams members were encouraged to share what they had individually created and then consider how to combine or organise some element from each member's work, into a team design.  the finalised design was sketched onto a square canvas and penned in with a permanent marker.

The colour was added later by the teams, with a great product called Lyra Aquacolor Pastel. The design can be coloured in allowing for more control, then water painted to fill the spaces. Bright, vivid paintings were the result of this workshop. The students and parents loved this display  at the show.