The Hunter and the Hunted

I have a set of outdoor decorations that I like to hang up on my bulletin boards.  Earlier this year, I got an awesome poster about Wolf Awareness Week with a great painting of a wolf on it.  I took one of my little mouse decorations and put it right in front of the wolf's nose on the poster as a joke.  The students loved it and I though it would be fun to move the mouse around the room and hide it a bit.  I started moving it every week or two so all of my classes got a chance to find it.  I just put up an owl last week so I told students that the owl is the reason the mouse is always hiding.  Here is my latest hiding spot.

Above is the Owl

The mouse was a tough find this week.

The Great Outdoors in the Art Room

Living and Teaching in a small town in Northern Wisconsin is perfect for me.  I am an avid outdoors man and love hiking, hunting, and fishing.  Most of the students in this area also enjoy these things and have grown up doing them, which has slowly had an impact on my class.  We talk about animals and the outdoors a lot, so I thought I would bring in a few strange animals that I had.  I brought in a stuffed armadillo and a pheasant mount and within a week had students bringing me all kinds of interesting an odd animal related things.  I have a buffalo and cow skull, multiple deer skulls and antlers, a snapping turtle shell, two alligator heads, and all sorts of cool weird things that my students have brought in for me to display.  It works out really well for still life drawings :)  I also started an outdoor picture board in my room.  I told students that they can bring me any picture (photo or drawing) that has to do with the outdoors or nature and I would hang it up.  We have tons of cool photos of fish, ducks, geese, deer, bears, and camping adventures.  The students love checking out all the other kids pictures.  Turned out to be quite a success.

Office Mural: Bulldog Pride

Our wonderful office staff at Peshtigo Elementary came to me about two months ago and asked if I would be interested in helping them spice up our school office with some Peshtigo Bulldog Pride! I agreed of course and they threw some ideas my way.  After about a week of planning I presented them with my idea and we ran with it.  After some extra hours in the office, we now have a BIG bulldog looking out over our school office.  I got to paint on two walls and they wanted to keep it simple and tasteful.  Let me know what you think!

Cooper, WATCH OUT!!

Here in Wisconsin, hunting is kind of a big deal.  Not only do I love to hunt, but almost all of my students love the outdoors and many of them hunt as well (pretty cool living in a small town in Northern WI).  So about a week before the annual Gun Deer Hunting Season, I decided that we better give Cooper a little protection since he has such huge antlers.  We didn't need Cooper, our artsy moose, getting hunted so I painted him a nice little blaze orange coat and made him a hunting cap.  The kids loved it and so did I haha.

Cooper meets some new friends

Shortly after bringing in my class mascot, Cooper the Moose, students began bringing in friends for him so that he wouldn't be lonely.  Very thoughtful and fun haha but it has certainly gotten a bit out of hand as I now have over 100 animals surrounding Cooper and every time students come into my classroom the first thing they ask is "Did you get any new animals Mr. Malcore?"  Here are some of his first new buddies.

Cooper shows his Packer Pride

A couple of weeks after I introduced Cooper the moose to my students, I decided it was time for a wardrobe change...GO PACK GO!!  I painted Cooper a #52 Clay Mathews Green Bay Packer jersey and the kids loved it.  With a few days students had brought in a helmet for him and a #50 AJ Hawk jersey for Cooper's girl friend Lucy, another moose that a student brought in so Cooper wouldn't be lonely.

Hello Class!! Say hi to Cooper.

This past summer, the summer of 2011, was my third summer at an 8 week sleep away camp in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.  I had gone on many job interviews before leaving for camp for the summer and had my fingers crossed so hard they were blue in hopes that I would secure an art teaching position before I left.  My dream came true!! I was offered the Elementary Art Teaching job for the Peshtigo School District which is about an hour North of Green Bay, WI.  Needless to say... I was ecstatic!  While working as a camp counselor that summer, I was able to do a lot of traveling around the East Coast with my campers and the idea dawned on me that I should take full advantage of this.  I decided to create my own class mascot and use it to help introduce myself to my new students in the fall.  Being an avid outdoors man, I have always had a strange obsession with moose, so I found a cool little moose figurine and began carrying him with me everywhere I went, taking photos of him doing various things and posing in front of famous and historic sites in Boston, New York City, and various other places along the way.  I named him Cooper the Moose and he soon became a celebrity among the children at camp so I new that my students would also like him.  When I returned home from camp and began setting up my classroom, I made a slide show of all the places that Cooper traveled to this past summer.  This way, I was introducing myself to the students and they learned about some cool things that I got to do without me saying "I did this, and I went here" because all the focus was on Cooper.  The kids loved him and especially like it when I paint different outfits and costumes on him.  Here are some photos or my little artsy moose...Cooper

Cooper checking out the Harvard Campus.

Cooper getting ready for a famous  Duck Tour of Boston.

Walking on water in front of the Prudential Center.

Can't go to Boston without trying on some Red Sox.

I took a group of campers on an off-camp hiking adventure and kids had a blast finding neat places for Cooper to pose.