Ah, the Vikings. I love teaching about how the Vikings mastered the sea, navigating vast expanses of open sea without compasses, satellites, or radio communications. Their skillfully crafted wooden ships could take them anywhere. This little Viking ship postcard is just one visual that belongs in a packet of images related to Celtic and Viking art.
It is amazing that I can successfully navigate the makeshift filing system of artifacts and visuals located in the below a little school house in my district. The storage room, to a few art teachers I work with, is known lovingly as THE BASEMENT. It is smelly, damp, buggy, and crammed with boxes, foam trays, egg cartons, posters, you name it, we probably have it in the basement. It doesn't have an electronic filing system and the selves aren't labeled with fancy shelf markers. Quite frankly, it is a haven for cockroaches, the Grand Budapest Hotel for those crunchy critters to hide in the cardboard and foam.
It is amazing that I can successfully navigate the makeshift filing system of artifacts and visuals located in the below a little school house in my district. The storage room, to a few art teachers I work with, is known lovingly as THE BASEMENT. It is smelly, damp, buggy, and crammed with boxes, foam trays, egg cartons, posters, you name it, we probably have it in the basement. It doesn't have an electronic filing system and the selves aren't labeled with fancy shelf markers. Quite frankly, it is a haven for cockroaches, the Grand Budapest Hotel for those crunchy critters to hide in the cardboard and foam.
To access THE BASEMENT, one must first descend a treacherous staircase, arms loaded with boxes and packets and files. It is much better if you can experience this your first time when the stairs are icy. At the very least, you must visit when it is a 110 degrees, as you press your armload of supplies against yourself and fumble with the keys to unlock the padlock. When I go at night, I'm always afraid that the Basilisk from Harry Potter will pop out of that little drain in the ground while my hands are full and I am trying to unlock the lock. At the very least, I am afraid of a black snack, curled up in the leaves in the corner will slither over while I am trying enter the basement, and I will be too afraid of its little army of baby snakes hiding in the leaves to go into the storage room.
This room has not been cleaned for many years. Another teacher and myself, spent a couple of hours last spring hauling out piles of old boxes and dried up paint that had come to live amongst the clutter. As disorganized and chaotic as this looks to a layperson, I can assure you that Leslie and I can determine exactly where a little postcard of a Viking ship should reside, and we can file it the correct spot, in a matter of just a few seconds. Whenever we go to the basement, it is a quick IN and OUT sort of trip. Grab what you need and bolt.
This location is a great place to keep colored sand for sand painting, a box of old shoes for shoe printing, extra plastic buckets for making paper, shells, bubble wrap, all the junk that is helpful once in a while, but you just don't have room to store in a classroom. I can't imagine NOT having a place to put all of these big packets full of visuals and samples. When I traveled between schools, it was so nice having a neutral location for these things so that I didn't not have to wonder which school they were housed, they were at the basement.
To most people, this room probably just looks like a giant junk heap. But I can't imagine teaching art without access to all of the stuff that is stored down here. It might look completely unorganized, but once you learn the system, the room is filled with treasures (ahem, to an art teacher). And you might argue that this room is really Leslie's accomplishment, and I am just her little understudy in the basement of wonders, but I have my own little corner, filled with all kinds of great things too.
Where do you store all of your random supplies? Do you have to scavenge for every project or is there somewhere that you keep stuff like this?
To most people, this room probably just looks like a giant junk heap. But I can't imagine teaching art without access to all of the stuff that is stored down here. It might look completely unorganized, but once you learn the system, the room is filled with treasures (ahem, to an art teacher). And you might argue that this room is really Leslie's accomplishment, and I am just her little understudy in the basement of wonders, but I have my own little corner, filled with all kinds of great things too.
Where do you store all of your random supplies? Do you have to scavenge for every project or is there somewhere that you keep stuff like this?
RSS Feed
