Thursday, August 08, 2024

Showcasing Student work with a Weekly Newsletter

Last year, I made a new commitment to create a weekly newsletter for each of my art courses to celebrate student work and to share exactly what goes on in an art classroom. These newsletters were distributed to parents and students via email and also shared on our class Facebook page. While it was a significant commitment and required a substantial amount of effort, the positive feedback from parents was truly rewarding. The regular communication not only fostered appreciation for the effort put into the newsletters but also facilitated smoother interactions when addressing more serious issues.


Within the newsletters, I provided a summary of the students' ongoing projects while advocating for the importance of visual arts education in public schools. Parents gained insight into the content of the courses and developed a better understanding of the artistic process. Additionally, I included essential upcoming dates, contact information, and visually engaging images to enhance the content.

Sizing and resizing the images to look nice in the newsletter was a huge time suck. After investing many hours in developing a template with various image sizes and formats for easy editing, I am pleased with the design and functionality. I created multiple versions of the template in different colors to cater to the preferences of educators, and I'm excited to announce that this resource is now available for purchase on Teachers Pay Teachers!

Thursday, August 01, 2024

Lesson Plans for AP Art 2D and Drawing: Week 1

After teaching AP Art (2D and Drawing) for over 10 years, I'm finally curating and polishing my resources for Teachers Pay Teachers. I just created my first bundle: Week 1 of AP Art. This google drive folder contains a week's worth of lesson plans that I use in the first week of my AP Art class. Materials include: lesson plans, syllabus, CED quiz and answer key, course skills and the corresponding daily video on AP College board site, activity familiarizing students with AP course rubrics, assignment with rubric for developing a Sustained Investigation, project development assignment with google slide and canva template students can use to document their work.