So I made it through my first day of student teaching, and by the time this post is live, I’m hoping to have made it through the first three days!  With it only being my first day back, I haven’t started teaching anything yet because I need to get acclimated and know what is going on in each art class first—understanding the dynamics of each and every class is super important to creating effective lessons. Every class works at a different pace, some classes may be more chatty than others or may have more questions, and at this time of the year, some classes may be behind because of snow days. Each school district has different procedures and curriculum that they follow, and a different budget for the supplies that they order.

There are so many things that play into being a successful art teacher, and I’m here to chronicle my findings through the next 7 weeks in an elementary art class before spring break comes and then the following 8 weeks in a high school art class on a block schedule before I graduate and (hopefully) get a classroom of my own!

Pictured above is the outfit that I wore for my first day!  I love wearing dresses when I can because they are so effortlessly easy and look so put together!

Here are a few things that I hope to find out in the next few weeks:

• What supplies are good supplies in an art room?  Is there such a thing as a poor quality supply at this level?
• Are the lessons that I wrote in my curriculum class two years ago going to hold up when I try to teach them?  Will I need to rewrite my lessons and add a bunch of adaptations?  Or possibly just write new lessons?
• What classroom management strategies will I be using?  (peep- I’ve already started using some strategies on some chatty boys, but they really don’t care for the zone of proximity as the “teacher stare” seems to work better.)
• Will I be able to try out my classroom incentive system? And will it be effective?

I’m in it for the long run, and I cannot wait to look back in May and see everything that I learned through this process. Let the weekly chronicling begin!