Do You Need An App That Helps With Art Vocabulary?

Do you have any ELL students in any of your art classes?  I do, I have a group of ELL students in one of my kindergarten classes. And I have found an app that helps me to reinforce my art vocabulary with those students who are in the process of learning English. I wanted to share it with you.

It's called Decide Now! I heard about the app on Twitter. (Sorry, I can't remember who was tweeting about it.) It's not really made as an educational app. It looks more like a Wheel of Fortune that you can spin around. But I've been able to use it to reinforce art vocabulary.

You can change the labels on the wheel to what ever you want it to have. On the two above I decided to insert shape and line vocabulary words.  

Once a week I get to work with the ELL kids in a small group. And every once in a while I let them play with the Decide Now! app to work on their use of  art vocabulary.

The kids take turns tapping the green button on the center of the wheel. It spins around and lands on one of the vocabulary words. They then have to say what the word is and draw the what ever word is chosen. It could be straight line, curvy line or zig-zag line. Square, rectangle or leaf shape.

Below are some of the drawings the kids made using Decide Now! to practice their shape and line art vocabulary.

What do you think about this app? Would you use it in your art class to help with vocabulary?

Collage Books- Elementary Style

I spent most of 1st quarter working on these collage books with my 5th graders. The books are to be an 'All About Me' book which reflect things that  are a important in their life. 

We started off looking at the art work of Romare Bearden  to see the techniques he used to make collages. You can see my Romare Bearden Prezi here.

                     

The students were required to make 5 pages and a cover for their book. I was open about what the pages could focus on. They could have a My Family page, My Pet page, My favorite Sport page, My Favorite Class page, etc., or what ever they could think of.

I did required a couple of  specific pages in the books though. One page I require them to have is a poem they've written about our city. In 5th grade Social Studies they study about our city and then they wrote a poem about our city in ELA class. So it was really great to have the help of their classroom teacher with this project. 

Every page was required to have a combination of

 text and images on it. 

Above is an example of a 'My Pet' page.

                  

Lyrics from "My Favorite Song' page are written on 'pop outs' like the one above.

The poems about our city were also written on 'pop outs' like the one above.

An example of 'My Family' page is above.

If students didn't have photographs they could draw pictures like the ones above.

Above is an example of a 'Favorite Sport' page.

One thing I have to really keep reminding the kids of, is to keep the left side clear of too many layers. That is the side where I bind the pages together with metal rings that I get at Micheal's Art and Crafts.

When the pages are all done I let the kids glue some 'jewels' on to them. You can see some 'jewels' glued on the cove page above.

What do you think of our collage books? Would these work in your art class?

Thank You!!!

I received this from one of my  art classes a few days before Christmas this year. I thought it was a wonderful gift to receive. It's so nice to feel appreciated.  

I wanted to share it with all of you teachers out there because I think you all deserve a great big  Thank You!!!