Welcome Back to the 2016-2017 School Year!! :)

Hello Students and Parents,

Key points I review in this post:

• Mrs. Nicholas’s Art Blog
• Art Folders/ Appropriate Art Clothes
• Artsonia
• @hillcrestartroom Instagram
• My Name Change--Brown to Nicholas

Art Blog: I’m really looking forward to working with all of you for the 2016-2017 school year! I have a few important bits of info to share with you. I’ll usually send a Skyward message to let you know when I've posted something you might need to know or might be interested here on the Art Blog. Please ‘follow’ the blog to automatically get alerted when I post something new. My blog and Skyward are my main ways of communicating with you at home.

http://mrsnicholasartblog.blogspot.com/

Folders/Clothes: All of my students will need a folder with pockets inside of it for class. It can be plain, or have a cool design, whatever you’d like. No binders please! Just know that I will require it to stay in my classroom for the entire year and you will need to write your name on it in sharpie. I’ll send it home at the end of the year. I’ll send a reminder as to when exactly these are due in class over the next couple of days. Also, I do not provide art shirts or smocks in class. My advice is to remember what two days of the cycle you have art and make sure you don’t wear your favorite outfit on those days or you will risk getting it messy. I do use washable paint 99% of the time, but I cannot guarantee stains will always come out. Students are welcome to bring their own art shirts, but they cannot be kept in my classroom and will be the student’s responsibility to remember it.

Artsonia: The sixth grade students are mostly all familiar with Artsonia, but this is probably new to most of the fifth graders. Artsonia is an amazing website where we will be uploading photos of the students artwork in class. I have created an account for each of my students already and parents, you will receive an email asking if you approve your child’s artwork to be shown live online. If you don’t get the email, check your spam folder, it may have gotten filtered there on accident. The kids’ username does not show their last name for privacy, it’s typically their first name and a bunch of numbers. It’s a really great tool for a few reasons, you can log on and comment on your child’s artwork, you can invite family members to check out the work as well by sharing it, and you can order merch with your child’s artwork printed on it. I’ve had so much positive feedback from parents in the past so, enjoy!

@hillcrestartroom Instagram: I created a Hillcrest Instagram account last year for my classroom. The handle is @hillcrestartroom. I tell the students that they must follow your rules at home about Instagram usage and it is not a requirement to follow me on there. I simply noticed that a large majority of my students were already on instagram and decided to try and add something positive to their feed.

Name Change: And last, I got married over the summer and changed my last name from Brown to Nicholas. It’s still Brown in a lot of places, like on Skyward. I’ll try to remember to sign my emails with (Brown) in parentheses. For the first part of the year at least my email will still be mbrown@norwinsd.org. Sorry for any confusion!

Looking forward to an awesome year! Thanks!

Mrs. Molli Nicholas (Brown)