NAEA Boston

Here is my agenda for the month of March:
Attend NAEA Conference at Boston on the 4th, 5th and 6th and present with Clark on our "Transition to Choice" and "Electronic Portfolios in the Choice Classroom." During that time I plan to meet with all of our distinguished TAB colleagues along with other art education professionals and participate in discussions of what the future may hold. March 7th through 17th will be devoted to preparations for our mega elementary exhibit with Clark's elementary school, Sugar Creek, the Southern Hancock Elementary Schools Fine Arts Festival. This will be our 4th annual exhibit and it is a great show but takes a lot of planning and preparation to pull off.....Lately, I have had our kids busy as can be getting their art work ready with touchups, mounting, artist statements and everything else.....I am determined to have those kids do as much of the work as possible so when show set up time comes, all I have to do is plaster it up on to the walls....
Here in Indiana, public education revenues are not looking good. Our new Governor, Mitch Daniels, proposed withholding previously promised revenues to the amount of 27 million dollars, will be withheld to public schools across the state. Next year, education funding is basically frozen at the current amount.....What does this do to school corporations whose financial situation is allready tight? Programs are cut, RIFs are levied and kids lose out....fortunately, the legislature has not approved these cuts yet.....We will see what happens.

Spring Art Show Preparations

We have been "goin to town" in the art room, getting ready for our annual Spring art show. Our kids have been writing artist statements on the computer, touching up previously selected art, updating electronic portfolios, and creating new art.....I am having some success getting kids to write their reflective statements voluntarily but I know I will have to extrinsically motivate others to complete this part of their art show preparation tasks......We have been experimenting with our digital video camera creating home made stop/action animation films. The kids do automatic drawings on 24 x 18 inch paper. So far I have strung together 60 seconds of animation and it is very cool to watch the drawings morph from a blank piece of paper. The kids who have worked on the animation want to continue and so they are really into it and always on me to do more. I have been interested in using digital film since I saw Hall Davidson at the Indiana Computer Educators Conference last year. More on our adventure into animation later.

Animation Experiment 

2nd Grade Artists Writing Statements.