What would you like to see on the site? Do you have any suggestions?:
I was observed today by the local authority. I told them I had been engaging the less interested boys in my group with your Media Art project. She was very impressed and thought it was amazing as it linked very well to culture and PSHE. During my feedback she said she had never seen that used before and that it I should patent it, so thanks for that, the students have found it challenging but are really kicking off with it now.
Amanda Skilton
A whole host of beautifully designed art lesson plans for teaching art, craft and design at all ages
The Paul Carney arts website contains loads of resources and lesson plans for teaching art at all phases of education. Many are completely free art lesson plans and some are low cost, but all have been designed and made by me over twenty years of teaching art. Pages are divided into Early Primary art lessons, Primary Elementary art lessons and Secondary art lessons to make it easier to find what you are looking for and there are also specialist pages on assessing art. All of my resources are
designed to the highest standards with everything you need t from lesson plans to handouts, pictures and presentations.
&I also offer a full art creative consultancy service to UK and international schools and
provide Teacher Training services. I like to think I'm a friendly guy, so please don't hesitate to contact me.& Paul
Art Teacher's Handbook 2015
Completely revised and rewritten, my Art Teacher's Handbook is 20 years art teaching experience as an Advanced Skills Teacher, Head of Department and Primary art teacher condensed into 267 pages. Contains: 40 supporting files, a new chapter on pedagogies, taxonomies and learning styles, another on Questioning Techniques. Also a guide to teaching painting and a new fully illustrated art progression guide
Key Stage 3 assessing art without levels
For those who do not want to buy my full Art Teacher's Handbook, this is the Assessing without Levels chapter on its own. Shows you what to look for when assessing art, how to monitor pupils progress easily and effectively in the classroom and how to help pupils understand what they need to do to improve. Contains: a Pdf ebook and supporting files as Word docs for you to edit.
assessing art without levels
This ebook is the primary assessment chapter from my Handbbok. It shows you how to assess to the new National Curriculum attainment targets. It contains a complete progression model with loads of information to help you assess art with confidence. Contains a fully illustrated year by year progression model for Year 1 to 6 as well as loads more content and editable templates for you to use.
the Art of Questions
Raise attainment, open the door to pupil-centred teaching and ditch the teacher-led model. The art of questions is contained in the full Handbook and is a guide to developing a question based curriculum for art, craft and design. It shows you how to design art projects from deep questions for pupils of any age group as well as how to use questions for supporting students, exploring art materials, becoming an independent learner and in order that they can become thinking intelligent students.
How to Draw from Observation - Download version
The full observational drawing programme contains four drawing units to teach drawing from observation from the very beginnings to an advanced stage. They contain full windows format videos and Powerpoint presentations plus all associated worksheets. It even contains an Assessment system to make marking easy, even for a non-specialist
only ?19.99
ONLINE Version - How to Draw from Observation
Get both the FULL Drawing Programme download with additional ONLINE access! For just a small additional cost you can get
a unique log in and password to accompany your drawing programme.This allows your whole school to access it from home so they can teach themselves how to draw. For me this is the real secret allow the pupils to learn from their own unique starting points and check that they have mastered one stage before they move on to the next. Teach the whole school online for only ?39.99
Foundation Drawing
Foundation Stage for unconfident, SEN or younger artists. Typically, students working at this stage will be 7-9 or people who completely lack the confidence to draw anything. The download contains: Basic Tips in drawing, Drawing Simple Shapes, Shading Part 1a, Flat tones, Shading Part 1b, Light to Dark, Cartoon Drawing. Contains 5 Windows format videos, 5 Powerpoints
Beginner Drawing
Beginner Stage for students approx 7-11 age to develop 3D drawing and shading. This stage contains lessons in: 3D Shapes. Shading a Cube/Cylinder, Shading a Sphere, Still Life Drawing, Lettering, Perspective, Cartoon Shading, Plus worksheets and assessment sheets. The download contains 3 Windows format videos, 8 Powerpoint
plus work sheets
Intermediate
Intermediate Stage for more advanced KS2 or younger KS3 students to develop into observational drawing.
The download contains: Shading a bottle from observation, basic Measuring, Drawing and seeing details, practical exercises in Observational Drawing. Plus worksheets and assessment sheets. Contains 2 longer Windows format videos, 4 Powerpoint presentations
Advanced Drawing
Advanced Stage for students approx 13-16. By the end of this stage students should be fully confident in drawing from observation and will only need to practise those skills further. The download contains: Advanced Measuring exercises, Advanced Shading exercises,
Complex Drawing video (20 mins Plus assessment sheets. Contains 2 longer Windows format videos, 4 Powerpoint presentations
the Language of Drawing
Age 7-13 Abstract Drawing
lesson challenges students to invent a secret language then draw in an abstract way to communicate words and phrases in their own unique style. By comparing this to abstract artists they will be able to better understand the language of drawing. Complete with full Lesson Plan and Resources, it also comes with a free starter activity a
Age 7-16 Photo/Mixed Media
Suitable for most age ranges, this very flexible project combines digital photography with the art of observational drawing. It is a great project for getting some quality, expressive drawing work in student’s portfolios at exam stage or for teaching younger students to ‘see’ more closely. A very expressive esson, students are free to depict what they see in a variety of styles.
Age 11 -16
Thinking skills
Pop Art gets a 21st Century facelift! This a Contemporary Scheme aimed at improving thinking skills and asks deep, Essential Questions of your students to learn how Modern Art has evolved into a thriving contemporary movement. And instead of just making a bland Pop Art style picture, the students are challenged to think about how the media affects their life .
Expressive Painting
Age 11-16 Thinking skills
Expressive Painting Formal Elements: Age 10-16 FULL Contemporary Scheme inc. thinking skills. Improve your student's painting techniques whilst learning the FORMAL ELEMENTS of art. Using Essential Big Questions this FULL Unit of Work is beautifully designed to challenge and stretch your students whilst learning the history of abstract art from beginnings to present day.
Alien Landscape
Age 9-12 Drawing with pastel
The Alien Landscape project comprises: Lesson Plan, Powerpoint resources and handouts. It will show your students the principles of landscape drawing and painting, colour, depth of field, tonal range and scale in an enjoyable and stimulating project that young people enjoy. Boys LOVE this project! It goes really well with m design an alien.
Age 11-16 Photoshop & Drawing
This lesson teaches Photoshop by means of a detailed step-by-step exercise. You can use free online software if you don’t have Photoshop (links included.) There is also a detailed guide to drawing faces from observation. The skills are then combined into a fun Dream project. This is especially liked by the boys, they LOVE doing the Photoshop project.
Clay Animals
Age 7-12, 3D Clay
This lesson is well loved by children. It contains a Lesson Plan, Powerpoint presentation and teacher instructions and shows you in a clear, step-by-step guide how to make beautiful clay animals. Includes a ‘How to Make your own air-drying clay’ recipe so you can use this even if you don’t have a kiln.
Contemporary Drawing
12 Drawing lessons Age 7-18
The Ebook features 12 modern drawing activities that stimulate creative and unique approaches to drawing and do not require realistic drawing skills. Using common, everday resources, each exercise links to a contemporary artist so that your students can relate the activity to professional practice.
Funny Fish
Complete with beautiful supporting illustrations, a teaching Powerpoint and detailed Lesson Plan with full instructions, this 4-6 hour project teaches students to illustrate fish in detail using cross-hatching pen and ink techniques, before inventing their own weird and crazy fish to draw, design and make in a variety of ways.
NEW: Mr Murakami
Age 5 - 7 Painting
A delightful project that draws on the contemporary artist Takahashi Murakami to inspire painting skills theory, colour mixing, and lots of imaginative exercises. One for younger key stage 1 children, there are literacy links and lessons in colour theory, worksheets and art images for you to use in class.
NEW: Tony Cragg
Age 5 - 7, 3D Project
A delightful 3D making project that introduces the contemporary artist Tony Cragg's famous artwork Britain Seen from the North. The children will investigate the work, developing their literacy skills and their ability to understand contemporary art. After that they make their own large scale colour wheel mural using three simple making techniques.
Birds of Paradise
Age 5-7, 3D Craft
Learn about the fabulous birds of New Guinea and how they have evolved into some of the most stunning creatures on the planet. Teach sketchbook recording techniques, art methods and my own technique of making birds using PVA glue. This is a lovely craft project for younger art students and is such a huge topic, it can easily be developed into a cross-curricular theme.
Primary Lesson Pack
Aged 5-11 A whole host of Art lesson plans & resources:
Drawing Unit Foundation Stage
Drawing Unit Beginner Stage
Clay animals
Alien Landscape
Funny Fish
Language of Drawing
Birds of Paradise
Contemporary drawing
Mask Project
PLUS Art Handbook
Secondary Lesson Pack
Aged 11 - 16 A whole host of Art lessons & resources:
the FULL Drawing programme
Contemporary drawing
KS4 Media art
KS4 Expressive Painting
KS4 Macro Art
Dogon Mask Project
Alien Landscape
Funny Fish
Language of Drawing
Art teachers Handbook(Which includes assessment
African Mask Making
Age 7-16, 3D sculpture
Suitable for most age ranges, this very flexible mask making project leads your students through deep, web based investigation of the Dogon Tribe in Mali, to fully understand the reasons masks and ceremonial costumes are made, before providing a wealth of resources on mask design and mask making. With full colour resources, music files and incredible photos and mask images this project is a great resource to teach from.
Drawing with Letters
This simple drawing unit shows pupils how to draw using letters. Building confidence is so important when drawing and often pupils think objects are too difficult for them to draw. By associating letterforms with the object they are drawing you can make drawing seem easier.
UK teachers: You can order these items on disc. Just email me with an order number and I'll post it to your school. Pay nothing now!
Consultancy Service
I offer a friendly, professional art consultancy service to schools around the world, from early years right through to post-16 and advanced art. I've delivered training courses for leading UK Training providers and art galleries. My consultancy work has taken me to local education authorities and
schools from Kent to Newcastle, Italy, Canada and Bermuda and I am a registered NSEAD consultant.
I've had considerable experience of training graduate teachers, coaching & mentoring, NQT's, Vocational Education, improving GCSE results, assessment and questioning techniques including self-directed learning & independent learning. My training sessions can be written and tailored to your needs, they can be one-to-one, department focussed or whole school based. Whether you are looking to improve your department, get better results, raise skills, develop cross-curricular creativity or help motivate teachers then I think I can help.
Drawing & Painting skills sessions - Perfect for Primary schools from Early Years to Year 6, my sessions focus on identifying what it is that children struggle with and how you can improve their skill and confidence when you may not have much of it yourself. I've done these sessions as one-off whole school CPD days, as a series of twighlight sessions and as solo sessions. Great fun and motivation!
Primary Coordinators - Why not get me to into your school to work with you one-on-one, to help you to audit your art provision, plan activities, map curriculum progression, develop skills and creative learning or understand effective assessment strategies. It isn't any more expensive than going out on a course!
Assessment workshops - great for any stage of education, focussed on making assessment classroom based, effective and simple using AfL techniques, peer assessment and self-directed learning.
Raising Attainment in Secondary- focussed on raising GCSE exam results with
tried and testing techniques, developing curriculum models suited to your own pupils' needs. This session looks at your schools set up, data, past performance, your current curriculum, what types of teachers and learners you have and how best to maximise progression, whether that's to achieve more A stars or Grade C's. Personal advice, tailored to the needs of your department.
No Girls Allowed - Get those Boys really motivated and achieving in lessons! I spent many years teaching groups of very disaffected, disadvantaged boys and this session gets to the heart of why boys struggle to achieve, why they lose interest and mess around. It doesn't have to be a year on year battle to get them to work, you need to develop strategies that allow them to learn in the way that suits them and yet still gets results.
Independent Learning, metacognition and the Art of Questions - If you truly want to create the very best learners
then you need to understand metacognition, self-directed learning and develop a questioning model that really engages all pupils. Not just for high ability students,
I can show you how to implement these techniques across a range of abilities. This session isn't just 'pie-in-the-sky' philosophy taken from a text book, I've developed and tried these strategies in real classroom practice. I know what works!
Wot sum peeps av sed
Just wanted to say that I really enjoyed your course yesterday in London. It’s given me lots to think about and am still buzzing with ideas even though I’ve been back at school for a whole day. One of the best things about yesterday was the fact that as well as making us think about new approaches to the way we teach Art, you also gave us the practical tools to deliver the goods. The things you discussed with us really resonated with me and I can already see how we can change a few things that we do in the Art Dept to achieve more creative thinking in the kids. Sarah Wybraniec the Henry Beaufort School
Hi Paul, Thanks so much for your session yesterday, it was informative and inspiring!It was really interesting to see the new curriculum and have it explained by someone who understands the needs of the teacher as well as the pupils. Rory Hughes Amersham School
I just wanted to say a huge thank you for the course I attended yesterday, I have only been in teaching four years and the day really helped me to reconsider how I use assessment in my teaching.Thanks again. Kind regards, Florence Pilkington, the Folkestone School for Girls
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Downloads: Please be patient when downloading, some of the files can take a long time. Make sure you select the most suitable drive to download the files to. For school orders or to order hard copy DVD versions send your order by . Refunds: If you are having download problems then email me first, i'll try to get back to you the same day. If you are still disatisfied then I'll refund you. Simples!My view: The joys and challenges of raising a gifted child – Schools of Thought -
Chandra Moseley and her daughter, Nya
02:07 AM ET
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By Chandra Moseley, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Chandra Moseley is a working, single mom. A resident of a Colorado city, she makes sure to expose her daughter to small-town living through weekly trips to the Rocky Mountains.
(CNN) - My daughter, who is 5, was identified last year as "gifted.” Well, I honestly had never properly understood what being "gifted" meant. I naively thought, "Oh, my baby is so advanced, she is just so smart!”
For those of you who are truly unaware of what being gifted means, let me help you understand.
Gifted students are defined by the
as those who demonstrate outstanding levels of aptitude or competence in one or more domains.
The part of the definition that’s missing - and what I so desperately needed to understand - is the social and behavioral issues that may come with giftedness.
For one thing, my daughter, Nya, is a perfectionist. She gets frustrated even if she only slightly draws outside of the lines. She also gets unnerved by certain loud noises (buzzing or toilets flushing) and even the seams on her socks.
I’ve had to turn her socks inside out because the seam on her toes irritated her so much. I thought she was just being fussy.
I became aware of Nya’s giftedness through Rev. Regina Groff, a family member’s minister, who noticed the way Nya was coloring when she was just 2. Rev. Groff has gifted children of her own and recognized Nya's frustration each time she drew outside of the lines. That type of frustration and overexcelling is all part of the perfectionism characteristic of being gifted. Just that simple act of frustration revealed her giftedness at the right time that day.
There are other characteristics of giftedness that for many, including my daughter, are telltale signs - excessive energy, unending curiosity, emotionally advanced, early and superior language skills or a need for perfectionism. Gifted children might have supersensitivities, and that’s what was going on with the loud noises and her socks.
Rev. Groff suggested getting Nya tested and recommended an early childhood education public preschool that has a program for gifted children. Her children attended the same school, and she could not say enough good things about it. I was in the process of trying to find, as many parents do, the "perfect preschool.” Thank God, I listened to her advice and pursued that specific school. I am a firm believer in the notion that God sends people into our lives to guide us, inspire us, lead us and teach us. Rev. Groff guided me that day into the right place my daughter needed to be, and Nya continues to guide me into the right place I need to be.
Nya, which means fulfilled wish, has always been extraordinarily special to me. She was a gift from the day she was born, delivered to me by another vessel. Nya is adopted. I sometimes have to remind myself of that because she couldn't possibly be any more like me. In what I thought could be only one miraculous event by her being born, she continues to produce miracles and forever enrich my life. She has not only taught me what unconditional love feels like - how to laugh until your belly aches, how to play like you are the silliest person in the room - but also how to be so aware that every challenging moment in your life exposes you, teaches you and prepares you for something to come.
I remember Nya’s first year of preschool. What could have been a 10 minute homework session (yes, homework in preschool) turned into an hour and a half of erasing and rewriting each word until in her mind it was perfect. Let me tell you, there were many pencils being thrown across the room (not by me), breakdowns, and crying (yes, some by me.)
What I didn't understand at the time was her constant quest for perfection.
Her amazing teacher, Brenda Natt, explained to me that it is all part of being gifted and that was the very reason Natt cuts off all the erasers of her pencils in her classroom. She understands that her students struggle with that issue and what she wanted them to understand was that it was OK if something isn't perfect sometimes.
The same teacher strongly advised me to enroll Nya in a gifted school to prevent her from getting lost in the loopholes of a typical school program - not only academically but also emotionally. She told me, "gifted kids are almost comparable to special needs children. While their IQs are high, they have behavioral aspects that need special attention and the right teachers with the right understanding to guide them."
After four years of questions - How can Nya go from 1 to 10 over something so simple? How can she be so sweet, compassionate, mellow and then completely lose her cool over not remembering the right words to a verse of a song? Why is she such a hothead? - all of this was finally making sense. If I only knew then what I know now.
What I have learned is not to deter Nya from finishing a project or even a simple task when she’s in the middle of it. Gifted children are not
they all have very different levels of needs, some more than others.
It has been fascinating and amusing to talk to other moms in her class and compare how they react to certain situations in the same way. I am constantly learning and trying to gain knowledge on how to help Nya be the person she is destined to be, while she has helped me be the person we needed me to be.
One of the most important things now truly embedded in my thought process is the notion that we just don't know what a child may be struggling with or what a parent might be going through. Many of us have witnessed situations in stores or restaurants where a child is lashing out or just having a complete breakdown and we are so quick to assume or place judgment on that parent.
"They just don't know how to discipline!" "That child is a complete brat!" or even "That kid is completely out of control and that parent has no idea what they are doing!"
What I have realized is that parents are all on the same team. I really wish we would start doing less criticizing of each other and do more listening, learning, encouraging and supporting. Like my example in the store, maybe next time we see a child in that circumstance, we can evaluate that situation and maybe show support by a kind smile, a glance of understanding, a sweet distraction or maybe, for some, a sincere prayer.
That’s what it's all about, right? To learn from each other and grow with each other. To continue to become better for each other, our children and generations to come.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Chandra Moseley.
CNN’s Schools of Thought blog is a place for parents, educators and students to learn about and discuss what's happening in education. We're curious about what's happening before kindergarten, through college and beyond. Have a story to tell? Contact us at
Follow: @CNNSchools
Related: Student NewsCNN Student News is ten minutes of commercial-free, cost free news for middle and high school classrooms.
It is available on line on our website, as a free downloadable podcast on iTunes and on HLN at 4:00 a.m. ET weekdays during the school year.
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