Classroom Blog
Our school is participating in a Global Artist Trading Card Swap! An Artist Trading Card, or "ATC", is a miniature work of art that can be traded and collected, kind of like baseball cards. This is our school's first year making and trading ATCs, but our kids are loving it and are excited about making it a Hendrix tradition. Our students have been making and trading cards with each other all year long, but now we have the opportunity to trade with artists outside the Hendrix community! Here's how the swap works: it's hosted by a school in Minnesota, and teachers all over the world send in their students' ATCs. The host school will send our cards to other schools, and send us other cards in return! Click here to see how last year's trade worked- it's a really neat process! One of the things I included in our packages of ATCs was a link to this blog post. I am hoping that the schools who receive our cards will find this page. If you are from one of those schools, I would love for you to leave a comment and tell us where you are in the world! Here are some selections from the two hundred Artist Trading Cards that we mailed. Each card is beautiful and unique, and the product of really hard work from our incredible Hendrix artists! Second grade students made these self-portraits as an extension of the self-portrait projects they recently finished. (See their previous drawings here and here.) For these ATCs, students first made the drawings in permanent marker, then added color with liquid watercolors in either warm or cool colors. These "Rainbow Squiggle Paintings" by second, third, and fourth graders are so pretty. Our students were SO careful and precise when painting them- and they really enjoyed the process! We started by using a tiny brush to paint a squiggly line in the middle of the card. Then, students continued to add lines in various colors, following the contour of the original line as closely as possible. Next are these marker print ATCs. In this post you can see the whole process of making the marker prints using styrofoam and water-based markers. My kids LOVED this process. I had several kids tell me they begged their moms to take them to the dollar store so they could buy styrofoam plates to do more at home. I love when a project is so engaging that my kids want to continue it when they leave the art room! My fourth grade Gifted Art group made this set of prints and embellished them using metallic markers. Fourth graders also made these cards featuring their Color Name Poems. This project was an extension of this painting and poetry project we worked on right before the holiday break in December. We cut their extra paintings down to ATC-size, and students collaged the best line from their poems on top. Both the colors and the poetry are absolutely gorgeous! This next set of ATCs represents the largest portion of our cards- I think 80 of our total 200 cards came from this project. I think these are some of our most beautiful contributions. Rather than creating the cards in the traditional ATC size, students instead made large paintings and then cut them into smaller pieces. Students made the paintings in response to music they were hearing. The focus was on expressive mark-making... for example, the student might have painted fast, zig-zag marks in response to energetic, bouncy music, while choosing slow, swirling, marks in response to a more calm style of music. I didn't have a chance to take pictures of this group of kids painting, but here is a similar project that my kindergartners did earlier in the year. It's one of my favorite lessons for any age student. The last set of cards I want to share are ones that students created independently, rather than as part of a whole-class project. They are of a variety of different media and subject matter. Students worked on these cards as an early-finisher project after their main art projects were completed. These are some of my favorites, as they really capture my students' unique personalities! Our cards needed to be packaged in sets of ten before being mailed. I tried to include as much variety in each set as possible! I wanted each school that received our cards to have some of each type of card, if possible. And here are our 200 cards, each wrapped with a paper telling about our school and our state, as well as including contact information to reach me and to access this blog. Hendrix is reaching out to the world! One last thing, and this is mostly for other art teachers who may be reading this after receiving our cards- I always love seeing how other art teachers have their classrooms set up, especially in other parts of the world. Here is a glimpse inside our classroom at Hendrix Elementary in South Carolina: I hope you'll have a minute to explore the rest of our blog, and I'd love if you could leave us a comment!
1 Comment
3/10/2018 10:40:01 am
We have received your ATC's in Lee's Summit, MO. My students love all of the wonderful color in your cards! You have done an excellent job documenting the process on your website. You have inspired me to get my classroom site up and running.
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