Blogging: It's Harder Than You Think

After taking a week off from blogging in order to catch up with the assignments I had due this week, I found myself ready and willing to make a post earlier today. However, I just couldn't for the life of me think of anything interesting and art related to talk about. I was talking to Jana-Rae earlier today about how it is easy for her to write blog posts because she is super creative and she has made so many art projects and crafts that she can write about. This is not the case for me. If watching movies and TV was considered an art form, then I'd be the next Picasso and I'd be able to post a blog a day at least. However, as it stands I don't spend a lot of time thinking about, looking at, or creating art (with the exception of playing my guitar. Shameless YouTube channel plug http://www.youtube.com/user/sledge624 ).

Then I remembered that as I was thinking about ideas to use for my art lesson plans for this week, I kept bouncing between two different possible themes to use: Fall and Halloween. Since the focus of my lesson plans was on Fall, why not make this blog post about Halloween (a bit early, I know). One of my favorite parts of Halloween is carving a pumpkin. This is something I look forward to doing every year and I hope it is something that I will be able to share with students once I have my own classroom. Do kids still get to carve pumpkins in school? If so, who gets to keep the seeds for roasting in the oven? Anyways, here are a few of the pumpkins I've carved over the years.

Pretty cool, right?I know these pumpkin pictures aren't likely to be placed in The Louvre any time soon, but the pumpkins were super fun to carve and looking at them in these pictures still makes me smile. And isn't that, if nothing else, the response we want our students to get from art? Whether it's visual art, music, drama, or dance, it is our job as teachers to show students how fun art can be and provide them with a project or a memory that they can look back on and smile about.