Maybe I'm a huge nerd, but I love puns. So for a recent sub plan, I left a an actual 'art sub' lesson. When I had to be gone again, I thought it would be funny to leave another play on words and leave an submarine sandwich sub plan. ;-)

Here's what I left:
Step 1: Introduce yourself to the class. Read the following poem and discuss YOUR expectations, by having students list how they should behave in art when Mrs. Mitchell IS here.

Take a ride with me,
On the art submarine sandwich.
We will pile it high, nearly to the sky.
I wonder what we will eat on the art submarine!?

You must be wondering about Mrs. Mitchell,
I can only tell you that she must be ill
But today is the day
that we will play
With the idea of an art submarine sandwich.

Just close your eyes, I'm sure you can imagine
A sandwich where anything can happen
The wonderous site that is
A hogie bun overflowing
In a rainbow of colors
Full of your favorite foods and others

"You are just a sub," they say,
"Only Mrs. Mitchell can show us the way!"
But class have no fear
the challenge is clear,
Today we must design
(by coloring and drawing with lines)

The most amazing art submarine
that Mrs. Mitchell has ever seen.

Step 2
Ask students: If you were making an ART submarine sandwich, piled high with toppings, what might you put on it? (Ex: food, art supplies, tools, animals, candy) You can make it silly!
Step 3
Use the a posted images of submarine sandwiches to have students draw an ‘art’ submarine on white paper. Students should also draw the top and bottom bun first, and then add ‘food’ in layers between the buns. Students should draw their submarine with pencils, trace over it with sharpies, and then color it with crayons, markers or colored pencils.

Step 4
Please collect the artwork and make sure students have their names on their papers. Stack each class on my desk with a label.
Supplies:
6X12 white paper
sharpies
pencils/erasers
​choice of crayons, markers or colored pencils

I was pleasantly surprised with many of the results. I wish a few of them would've added more details to fill in the white spaces between each food, but in some cases, the white areas work well as visual space between each item. I love the really silly ones. I was worried that some kids would rush through this, so I also purchased the Silly Sandwich sub plan on TPT and left the visuals on the board so that the sub could use them for additional instructional input. 

This spring, I attended the Missouri Art Education Association Spring Conference, for the first time in like forever. I love to go and see all of my favorite art teachers from all over the state. I went to several awesome sessions, but one of my favorites was on a whim. We popped into see the little mini cheeseburger session, thinking that we would never be able to afford sculpey clay for all of our students so it was sort of a pointless one, but sounded like a lot of fun. 

It WAS a lot of fun and it gave me the idea to do tiny food with model magic. I usually order a couple of boxes of white model magic class packs each year and I save them for when everyone sort of has spring fever and no one is in the mood to draw. This week we started MAP testing so the tiny food was perfect. 

The hardest is part is taking the white model magic and making it a different color....like dark brown for hamburger meat. Also, the red gets all over your fingers, so I tell them to save red for last. Basically, students have to break the model magic into small pieces and color each section with markers. We used washable Mr. Sketch markers because they have the best pigment (and I had a big new class pack of the scented ones, which I thought would fit well with a tiny food project)

Students could make any tiny food that they wanted and at the end I gave them a little white paper plate they could decorate to take their food out the door with them on so it could harden in a safe spot. Also, I told them to save their wrapper to use as a placemat and to wrap their extra clay up in at the end. I gave them a little piece of tape to close it up so they could make something with it at home since most of them did not have time to use it all during class. 

I also had toothpick so they could make little corn dogs or smores. With sculpey, they can use the toothpics to add details, but model magic isn't as forgiving. This was a one-day challenge, and students took the project home the same day. I also made a little movie with directions since everyone is doing this on different days because of MAP testing...I was afraid I would forget some of the instructions. 

This year for teacher appreciation week, I came up with a fun-food-themed card. Based on whether the teacher had a sweet tooth (thanks to you we're smart cookies!) or a spicy preference (taco 'bout a great teacher), each student made a card, and I wrapped it up the stack of cards in ribbon, put it with either cookies or a taco spice packet as a surprise for the teacher. This was really fun and the kids did a pretty good job giving their food a face....And as an added bonus, we were working on the taco cards on Cinco de Mayo!

Students glued a strip inside the card and wrote the teacher's name and signed their own name. It was a great chance for them to add a special note or drawing too!

Here is the 'Thanks to You.....We're Smart Cookies' printable.

Here is the 'Taco 'bout a great teacher' printable.

For the cookie cards, students cut the corners of a 4X4 square to make it round. For the taco, we used a 4X6 yellow rectangle and trimmed off only the top two corners. We colored these cards using crayola color sticks, but crayons or markers would've been great too. I liked the color sticks because they were not messy and we had a chance to use 'colored pencils' without all the sharpening!

A few of my older students drew cookies with milk and some even drew a smart looking cookie monster with glasses.

How adorable is this illustration!!? Definitely inspired many of my students' cookies.

How awesome is this cookies and milk shirt from threadless?!

Love this illustration!