Everybody Clap Your Hands CLAP CLAP CLAPCLAP

There's always applause in adaptive art class! I team teach adaptive with the other art teacher in my building four days a week (every day but our late start/teacher collaboration day).  I've explained this before, but it bears repeating: the elementary school where I teach is a large one (around 1000 students).  We have two of everything except the cafeteria (two libraries, two gyms, two music classrooms and two art rooms). It's a HUGE advantage to have two art teachers. Last year, adaptive art met in my room.  This year, I've got an almost-six-month-old baby boy and I'm pumping 2x a day (oh the drudgery, but that's a whole different topic) so it's not really conducive to my usually-early adaptive students.  Thus, this year, adaptive art meets in the other teacher's art room.  I thought I'd use this post to share some of our adaptive art projects from this year:

These are paper quilts that the other art teacher was doing with her fifth graders and we (well, mostly her, because when they're meeting in your room you tend to do more of the planning, just how it's worked out for us these past two years) decided to do.  They spend a day painting with tempera blocks, then traced a diamond shape and cut them out, then folded a 12 x 12 construction paper in fourths and glued their diamonds to the middle making a star shape, then used Sharpie to do their "stitching".  They'll be displayed taped together as one large quilt (we have 19-20 adaptive students total, but they're split into three groups for art/music/pe).

And some painted name designs:

For these, they painted a letter at a time and then rubbed to transfer.  With our middle-abilities and intense needs group, we wrote their name out in pencil and they just traced over that with paint.

This past couple of weeks, we spent a day being a paper painting "factory" with sponge rollers to make interesting paper:

And then we made these awesome robots with our paper we made, some paper and foil paper scraps, marker and pipe cleaners:

LOVE the robots! They've got SO MUCH PERSONALITY.  Every single one is different, and it really worked their cutting and gluing skills.
I do enjoy teaching adaptive--they're enthusiastic and what they need is practice on skills, not a lot of background or history.  And it's time I see other adults (the other art teacher, paras) which I usually don't see due to my aforementioned pumping life ;-)