It’s official, student teaching is in full swing and I am starting to take over more and more classes. Yesterday was my first full day teaching elementary art and it has been a roller coaster of emotions, mostly my students’. There have been smiles and there have been tears, which I was most definitely not expecting on my first day, but everybody has their days and clearly yesterday was a bad one for one of my students. In those situations all you can do is try your best to calm them down and make them smile again.
The classroom had this very drab gray wall dividing the room into two spaces, so I added the project examples to the classes that have started the new projects, the artist’s portrait, and some art vocabulary words that go along with the lesson to add some color to the space. I also added a “Guess The Artist” feature that I will discuss in my next post.
The first class, because of the snow delay, was not able to take out any artwork and start the new lesson that I had planned for them. Instead, they got to watch a short clip of Bob Ross painting and they were mesmerized by it. Most of them just wanted to touch his hair though, they said. Then the 3rd graders came in and had to finish up their last project, even though they all thought that they were finished. Next week I will be introducing them to Seurat and pointillism, and they will be creating their own landscapes, while learning to color mix with their eyes rather than their brushes.
My kindergarten class started their new projects last week, and are continuing it this week. Yesterday, we reread Laurence Anholt’s “The Magic Garden” and the students started using their impressionist “painterly” brushstrokes to recreate their own version of his “Japenese Garden Bridge” painting.
The last class of the day was second grade and they took my pretest that I had to create for my Teacher Work Sample that goes along with the first student teaching placement. The test was on colors and the two famous artists that we will be studying. I asked them to color in 3 circles in the top row primary colors, and then the next three in the secondary colors. Then I asked them to circle the warm colors from a list as well as the cool from another list. On the back I had a picture of van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and Cezanné’s “Still Life with Apples” and asked them to label them from a word box. I read each question out loud to the class, as some have difficulties reading and comprehending for any of a multitude of reasons (I have many English Language Learners in the class) and many of the students still did not perform as well as I had expected. My co-op has gone over color theories and color families with them before, but I guess they forgot them!
It’ll be interesting to see what will be in store the next few weeks! Until next time!
