Lately, I've gotten into the habit of having dry erase boards on the table at the beginning of class for students to use as practice instead of their sketchbooks. 

Right before Christmas, we had a weird day where a bunch of kids were gone on a field trip and I wanted to do something with them a little different. I gave them an art challenge for the first 3 minutes. 

I set the timer on my smartwatch and challenged them to draw as many different types of trees as they could before time was up. Some kids drew the ones I had on the board, some made up their own, some drew the same tree over and over and over. 

I think it set the tone for the rest of the lesson. The kids were slightly more creative after having a 'do now' prompt that warmed up their creativity. 

When I first started at the middle school, I began each class period with seatwork. A prompt was on the board and the kids would spend 3-5 minutes responding with either a written response or a sketch. It was always such a pain to collect all the little papers (most of which went into the recycle bin) and keep the pencil trays stocked with paper. 

I always felt like it added extra pressure to my sub plan, do I include the seatwork in the instructions or not? What if I forgot to change the prompt on the board and I don't have a new one ready? 

Anyway, I'm toying with the idea of having a dry erase prompt more frequently this year.....

Do you do any bell ringers or seat work or art start prompts? 

After finishing our 3-D metal bugs, we had some scrap metal left over. I decided the best way to use it up would be to cut it into triangles and glue it onto a 'shattered mirror' origami tree. 

A few students still needed to finish their bugs, so I gave everyone a piece of 5X5 newspaper to practice this tree shape. I demonstrated the folds under the document camera. After everyone had practiced, the ones that were finished, were allowed to grab a piece of green paper. We just used some scraps of green construction paper that I had leftover from another project to make their trees.

Then, they cut their scraps into triangles (I demonstrated how to do this under the camera too). Other shapes were REALLY hard to cut, but triangles were fairly simple. Students used tacky glue to attach the aluminum. Finally, they spent a little time designing a background.

Students could use metallic colored pencils, regular colored pencils and metallic sharpies to decorate black scraps that we used for backgrounds. Each class did different sizes depending on how much time they had---a few classes were behind because of early outs, assemblies and days off. 

I let kids grab a pipe cleaner just before leaving, and I showed them quickly how to make a hanger and punch to holes at the top, being careful not to put the hole punch too close to the edge. 

There were a lot of really cute ones, but I let them take them home the same day so I forgot to take very many pictures. 

Supplies
square practice newspaper
green squares
scraps of aluminum
tacky glue
metallic markers
colored pencils
pipe cleaners
hole punches