Hello everyone. I feel like I'm addressing the State of the Union. I, my name is Jenn Russell and I have been sick. Um, I've been in and out of school. Um, my throat, I don't know what I got, I mean, whatever. Anyway. Last month on Art Show Secrets. It's December. December gets really crazy. Kind of sort of like a finish line for us. I am wrapping up our semester's worth of classes. I always do a mini art show. I do not know what I would do without my parent volunteers. December is nine and a half days long. We made it to break. That wraps up the month of December. Woo woo! Hey friends, I'm Sarah Krajewski, art teacher in Cambridge, Wisconsin. I'm Jenn Russell and I am the art teacher in North Texas. Welcome to Art Show Secrets, where we tell you what it's like to put on an art show from start to finish. It is January and I have to get all of my communication out so that everybody is aware that we have an art show and making it easy for people to flow through the art show. So that includes the poster that's gonna go all around school. We're also gonna talk about reaching out to vendors. So all of the community members that I utilize. I have to communicate with district administrators. We're gonna be doing some cool paper-making projects. And communicating with our advanced classes to make sure that it's on their calendar and they know they have to participate. Stay tuned for how we're gonna kind of enhance and enrich a little bit more of our day to day so that our art show can be amazing in May. Oh my gosh, I'm a poet you guys. I have to do all the communication stuff this month and get it on everyone's radar this month so that we can have some sort of representation from our district at our show. I have to send out just kind of like a formal invite to our district admin and then district communication. So they send out a photographer, a videographer, out to us on the day of our show. I'm gonna give our AP and advanced kids kind of like a checklist on what they should have for their display. They each get a table, they can have like a trifold out there, you know, their family can come see their portfolio because otherwise the portfolio just goes to portfolio land and it gets rated and graded but nobody really gets to see it. I'd have to make the poster that's going to go all over the school promoting our show with a date and time. So I have to confirm date, which is rough just because it already got questioned, so. A great place to start with student-created posters is FLEX Curriculum. The one I used for this month is called Planning a Poster and I personally used it. I know that paperwork's not my strong suit, so this was really nice to help me keep organized and what I needed to do for each one of the visuals and posters that I needed to get out to communications. If you're not a FLEX member or a FLEX user, make sure that you hit up the link in the description box below so you can get more information on how you can get FLEX for your district. Also, this is my desk. My coworker brought me a pickle the other day because I really wanted a pickle and then I didn't get a chance to eat it, but now it's a part of my desk decor. Here's my pickle. What's going on there, question mark? All right friends, let's talk banners and signage. Things that kind of direct people through the art show make it easy for them to find spaces is what makes the art show run so smoothly. Our art show actually runs through our entire school. So the art projects are by their students' classroom. So like fourth grade's project is by the fourth grade classroom. Luckily our PTO approved for us to get some fabric banners and I am hand making them with the help of art club to create a more permanent piece for our school that will in turn help with the art show, um, and make sure things run smoothly. So if this is the first one that I've finished, I love it so much, but it takes a lot of time. This is the fifth grade banner. This is the fourth grade one. So there's kind of like a pattern, a little bit of numbering and then some details to sort of make the banner a little bit more unique to the grade that it matches with. So my job is to now cut out all of these felt pieces, add the painting detail and then attach them. So these are the banners that have been up. They are paper, they still work, but they are just needing a little bit of an upgrade and we wanna have something up that's gonna be here for a long time. I have one for every grade level, art, music, 4K, office, library. So there are many, many to do. It will take me a bit of time, but once they're up I think they're gonna be awesome. I just went to print off like a little preview of my poster. Why is it pink? Okay, honestly it's just a printer, it doesn't even matter. I just wanted to see what it would look like of this is horrific, but I just have to submit a preview so that I can get it approved so that it can be printed by our library, which is an awesome resource that we have on campus. But that does take about two weeks. So I just have to get this going early enough so that hopefully I can have the big posters to put up in February. This was really cute. Um, this turned out well. This one is going to our district admin via our secretary, which is really nice. And then this hopefully will look a lot better, but I am just kind of, sort of at this point drowning in paperwork. I don't know if this is happening to you guys, but we have a lot of kids out. Everybody's like sick. Our clubs have been canceled. I'm just gonna do a little digital checklist for them of like things that they can get and what it should look like and just so that they can start thinking about how to put their display together. Okay. I also wanna tell you all, I mean, that's art teacher nails if I've ever seen some. I've been feeling a little under the weather and something that I've been doing, um, when I'm driving into school, I, if I can remember, I try to at some point during my drive, just do like a gentle smile to sort of like train my mind towards having a little bit of more of a positive leaning mindset. Like it's literally this, it's like... when I drive, right? Like somebody probably thinks I'm crazy if I pass 'cause I'm just like... We are also going to talk about reaching out to other vendors in your community. So I have a little list, um, of people that I need to reach out to. So I'm gonna show what that looks like. What do I gotta do? So when I look through here, I'm talking about which people do I need to reach out to. So today I am going to email my food truck vendors, my staff members and tell 'em about our staff art show wall and start to like look at who I need to contact to get that little bug in their ear about the art show coming up. I will also be making a list of some other community members that are gonna be part of our mini marketplace. Since we have hundreds of people that come to our show, I usually reach out to a few community businesses like our local coffee shop and different places that can come in, set up a little cafeteria table with information so that when adults and students come to the art show, they can gather a little bit more information about what our community of Cambridge has to offer. So if you're enjoying all these tips, be sure to check out PRO Learning. It is an on-demand PD for art teachers with hands-on tutorials and um, resources, strategies, all sorts of things to help you be successful. So if you're already a PRO member, we have a Pack on how to communicate with parents, which has a lot of great tips in there. Here's one of our resources from PRO that's gonna help you with some of the benefits. There's a bunch of stuff listed here that you can use for your admin or your community about why you wanna have those connections. We've also got a few tips on how best to connect with your community. For example, like what people to reach out to, what places to reach out to. This one is probably my favorite resource. It is all about 10 Ways to Find Local Artists Willing to Work with Your Students. So it's really about kind of getting yourself out there as well. Joining local art groups, going to gallery openings, how you can bring your advocacy to your classroom. If you're not a pro member, just remember that you can head over to our website and we'll link in the description box below how you can get a little bit more information to get pro for your district. Great news, money from my grant has been deposited into the spend account so I can actually order the display boards for the school. So I'm gonna do that. There's a lot that I have to do and I have been out a lot, but I have money for display boards. I've gotta put all the invites together. I've gotta start putting in the roster of who's gonna be in it or start asking, you know, kids and doing all that. On top of it being contest season, all of our images for our district show is due at the end of this month. Um, and hopefully eventually I won't sound croaky. I also do always just wanna give you a keep it real moment. Y'all. This isn't so bad right here, but like, can we talk about how like, what's happening? It's so, there's, it's too many things. Things aren't perfect. Just do the best you can. We've been like knee deep in clay and if you wanna check out a little bit more about how I run our Clay Week, it can be watched in my day in the life on making sure that you can be successful with clay. And when the kids were working on all of their clay projects, which this is just just a portion, I stayed after school, uh, one day during one of my prep times and just reminded myself, you love to create, so make something. So I threw on the wheel and I would just highly suggest to make sure you're encouraging that artist mindset in yourself. Part of what we're working on this month is gathering the materials for a little artist collaboration that I have with one of my paper making buddies, Maria. So I went and picked up her materials and I need to go get them from my car and saying that out loud, I'm wondering if any other art teachers are constantly just like transferring materials. Bring this, bring it here, bring this, deliver it there. It's constant. Having everything in my car for like a week that I needed to unload. One of the paper making tools just does this little jingle. So every time I would drive it was like jingling in the back of my car as a little like slow reminder. Like, you need to unload this, you need to unload this, you need to bring this into school. So that's been real fun. Um, but it's finally in here. So now I can do a little bit of practice with some of the paper making materials that we have so that next month we can create those pieces that we're gonna be using for our art show. If you're thinking ahead about what you want to do for your art show, it doesn't have to be like, do everything all at one time. It's like work in pieces and then decide how are you gonna tackle it on one little step at a time. This is the beautiful blender we'll be using. But then all of this is organized paper that has been cut into itty bitty little postage size pieces. Last year at the end of the year, it was like a great early-finisher task and I am so excited to turn it into paper and to have my counter space back. Alright, that about wraps it up for the month of January. I literally almost just said the month of May, but you know, everything's fine. Can't wait to hear our art show secrets for February? Make sure you like and subscribe to this video so that you can put on your best art show yet. Feel free to comment below so that you can tell me if you reach out to any vendors or community members to collaborate for your art show. Stay tuned. We will see you next month. I'm really excited. See you there. Goodbye. You're not gonna believe what happens next. Stay tuned. You'll know how they say that like February is like one of the hardest months for teachers. They're right, there's 7,000 things happening this month. Um, one of our last, uh, contests is coming up. I don't have, um, control over what's gonna happen.