Weaving

The second grade students are learning about weaving and making their own little blankets. We use pieces of cardboard as looms and the students were able to choose what size loom they wanted to work with, the bigger the loom, the larger the blanket will be. They all learned the over-under pattern needed to weave the weft yarn through the vertical warp threads. 

Some students chose to work together with a partner on one of the larger looms.

The loom is only needed as the base for weaving, once the weaving is complete, the students can take it off the cardboard and bring it home.

This student used mostly fabric to do his weaving and already finished!

Scavenger Hunt at Whole Foods – THURSDAY NOVEMBER 1 ONLY!

On Thursday, November 1 Whole Foods is donating 5% of sales to the Irving Schoolyard Project!

To support this effort over 30 teachers and staff from all District 97 schools volunteered to have their pictures placed in Whole Foods near their favorite food. You can find them! Go on a scavenger hunt to find them while also shopping to help the ISP! Get the full list of teachers when you come in the door, write down their favorite food when you find their picture, and enter the raffle to win a gift card from Whole Foods Market!  If time is an issue, please consider using their personal shopper (fee waived this day). All you do is place an order at least 48 hours in advance by emailing mw.rvf.marketing@wholefoods.com or calling 708.366.1045 (ask for Concierge Lauren) and then pick up your fulfilled order that day at a time specified by YOU! So head out to Whole Foods Market in River Forest on Thursday November 1st.

The Color Run

Some of you may have noticed my hair was a little greenish this week. That was some color left over from the Color Run that I ran on Sunday with Ms. Arroyo and Ms. Saliny. It was a 5K race where the runners got powdered with color throughout the course. It was a lot of fun!

Student Artwork featured at the Oak Park Housing Center Fundraiser

The Oak Park Regional Housing Center hosted their annual benefit on October 5th at Unity Temple. The organization assists families looking for apartments in the area and works towards creating lasting and meaningful diversity in our community.

To act as a visual representation of this diversity, student self portraits from Irving School were selected and displayed during the event. Students' whose portraits were chosen received a discounted invitation to the fundraiser.

What is a Self Portrait?

A portrait is a picture of a person.

A self portrait is a picture of yourself!

This is the second year the Irving students have drawn self portraits on the first day of art. 

Why are we drawing self portraits two years in a row? Because a lot has changed in a year! Not only have the students grown taller or changed their hair style, they have also become better artists.

Check out the students' drawings on ArtSonia.com: 
Self Portraits from 2011
Self Portraits from 2012

Welcome back to school!

I hope you all had an awesome summer, I know I did. The most exciting thing that happened to me this summer was that I got married! You might have noticed, the title of the blog is now "Mrs. Tague's Art Class," which is my new last name. It'll take some getting used to, so of course I'll still answer to Ms. Linne. 

Another change to art this year will be the addition of Ms. Naples to Irving. Since our school keeps growing and we've now added a fourth 3rd grade section, there is just not enough time in the week for me to teach all of the classes. Ms. Naples teaches art at Lincoln School and will be coming to Irving one day a week to teach two classes in the community room. 

 I'm really excited to start another year teaching art at Irving and can't wait to see all of you!

Irving's Solarbration Video!

Girls on the Run 5K

Congratulations girls, you did it!

Irving Art Fest 2012!

Solar-bration!

Irving Art Fest 2012

Mark your calendar for May 17th!

This year's Art Fest is going to be a true celebration of the arts! In the hallways there will be visual art on display representing all Irving students. There will also be Music, Dance, Spanish, Poetry, and Dramatic performances throughout the evening.

The event is being organized by Ms. Linne, Ms. Tarabus, Mrs. Hiolski, Ms. Noonan, Ms. Zaragoza, Mr. Williams, Mr. Packer, and Mr. Hancock. 


We hope to see you there!

10 Lessons the Arts Teach

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving
purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.

7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material.
All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said.
When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA.

Head, Body, Legs!

These 2nd grade works of art were inspired by the story "Head, Body, Legs." The students read the story in their classroom and created their own bodies in art class. Since the story came from Africa, in art we discussed the similarities between the illustrations in the story and other paintings by African artists. The 2nd graders learned how to draw and cut out each part of the body from colored paper, then they used paper fasteners to put their bodies together and paint to add details to the face and clothes.

The students "bodies" can now be seen in the hallways of Irving School. Some of them turned out to be the same size and the students themselves!

Collaborative Painting by the 5th graders

With the assistance of guest artist, Jenny Tiner, each of the 5th grade classes are working on a collaborative painting. Each student will have an opportunity to work on the painting along with their classmates during art. Before beginning the paintings, we discussed the importance of being respectful towards other students' work and expressing yourself and what you are feeling through the paint.

When completed, the three paintings will be up for sale as a part of the silent auction during Irving's Fun Fair on February 25th.