Ninja Notes

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Art Class

Sweet and Simple Two-Colour Watercolour Candy Cane Paintings

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We like to try teaching our students new watercolour techniques that will make their paintings more realistic. Being elememtary generalists means we're not experts but we've broken down this watercolour candy cane lesson so you can try it out with your students. It's a great Christmas art project, but more importantly you can teach students how to add light and shadow to their art projects to make them come alive.

We love to teach students new simple techniques for painting with watercolour. We created this Christmas art project that only uses two colours as a way to practice a technique where students remove paint from their page. This watercolour candy cane painting teaches students techniques like adding light and shadows.

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Five Easy Christmas Tree Projects for Leftover Bits and Pieces

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Do you have lots of odds and ends leftover from various Christmas art porjects and crafts over the years? Here are five projects to help use them up. Come find the free art project instructions and get some new ideas for your upper elementary students. These make great gifts or decorations during the festive season.
Rolled Christmas Wrapping Paper

If you’re like us (and most teachers), you likely have lots of bits and pieces left over from previous projects. We often have to buy a class set of things and always have one or two left over. The good news is that we have some projects that can use some of that up and still create awesome Christmas tree projects for your art class. Have your students gift them to their families. Come check out these Christmas tree projects.

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Recycle Old Art Projects 9 Fantastic Ways

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What do you do with old art projects that aren't really framing-worthy? There are lots of ways you can recycle and repurpose art in your classroom. This is a great way to get rid of practice work or those projects that just don't work out. Come read through these ideas and see what you can do in your upper elementary classroom today.

If you have a bunch of completed art projects or partially completed ones, we came up with a whole bunch of ways to recycle them into new things. Recycling art projects not only helps reduce waste but also encourages creativity and resourcefulness.

Before we recycle any piece of art, we encourage students to take a picture so it can be remembered but won’t take up space. This is so that students can see how they grow and change as artists as opposed to keeping it as a memory.

We hate wasting materials, so whenever possible, we recycle pieces of art projects and craft materials so they can be used again in the future. The last thing we want is for art projects to be thrown into the landfill. Sometimes we do art projects that are not meant for display because we are practicing skills. These are the ones we recycle first.

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9 Spectacular Art Projects For a Pen and Paper

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If you are looking for some very simple art projects you can do in your upper elementary classroom with just a pen and paper. We've included all the instructions so you can create these beautiful but very simple art projects for elementary students. Come take a look and find the one you'll save when you need something in a pinch.

Sometimes you need a quick art project that uses a pen and paper because you either don’t have access to other art materials or the time to set up something more complicated. That’s okay! There are many different art projects you can create using just a pen and paper. These are some of our favourite art pieces we have tried over the years with our upper elementary students. We have included basic instructions for you here. Continue reading to learn more.

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How to Bring Indigenous Culture into Art Lessons

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One way to show appreciation for Indigenous artists is to study their work as you would any great artist. We put together some of the ways we incorporate learning about Indigenous artists and other aspects of culture in Canada in one post. Come read more.

Incorporating the stories and culture of Indigenous people is important to us. It’s woven throughout our subject areas, but we often look for other places to provide opportunities to bring cultures together. We’ve had several students who share their Cree and Dene cultures with us. Other years we’ve had no one in our classroom with a direct connection to our Indigenous People. We want all of our students to feel connected to the history of our country and the people who were here first. One way we do this is by exploring the works of Indigenous artists in Canada.

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Are You Avoiding Teaching Art? How to Fix That

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Do you avoid teaching art because you can't handle the mess? Check out this list of ways to manage the mess and get some art lessons for your upper elementary students in the process.

If you are an elementary generalist in Canada, chances are, you are teaching art. That can be challenging if you don’t consider yourself an artist. Here are some tried and true routines we’ve put in place with our classes over the years that have saved our sanity.

Maybe you’ll start enjoying teaching art again!

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