Grasping Texture

This week in my art class we continued to focus on our texture study. The kids are really starting to understand how there are different textures and they are getting some good vocabulary words out of it, too! Our activity this week was dealing with draw hard with crayons and then crumbling up the paper and applying a thin wash of watered down black paint over the drawing. The cracks absorb the paint and create texture. They turned out really great, and the kids had fun making them! Teaching these kids has been such a great experience and I am really enjoying it.

Dealing with different situations as an educator

Holidays are always interesting to celebrate in K-12 schools. Public, private, and charter, they all have their rules and guidelines on what you can and cannot do on these days. More and more we are finding that holidays can be offensive to different types of people. Well as you know, this week we celebrated Valentines day. In my kindergarten class there are two children who's religion keeps them from celebrating such things as birthdays, Christmas, Halloween, and Valentines Day. But, it is fair to the other children to limit the activities they can do although the rest of the school is doing it? The way we compromised this problem is, we did the activities anyways. We felt that as a classroom the majority could join in the activities so it was only fair to keep it available to these children. So, for my lesson this week we made homemade Valentines and the two children who do not celebrate the religion didnt come. The teacher expected this, but the arrangement I had made for these two were to have them make a card that didn't have a connection with Valentines day. As an educator there are going to be many different situations that I am going to have to deal with, and this was a good lesson for me to get first hand experience with one of them.

Then there was flexiblity..

The main topic I dealt with this week in my internship was, flexibility. I created made my lesson plan and emailed it off to my host teacher on Monday. She responded by informing me that the students had a monthly assembly that they had to attend during the time that my art lesson was scheduled for. The problem I deal with every week is time. Im sure this is very relatable to anyone reading this. I only have a set time on Friday mornings to plan to be there. This seems to work very good for the kids because they know when I am going to be in the classroom, and they can look forward to their art lesson at the end of the week. I am interested in finding out how the kids felt about me not coming in last Friday. When I found out that I was not going to my school this week I was kind of bummed out, but I realized that this could be good. My plan for this week is to make the lesson extra good and be very prepared. This week we are making homemade Valentines! I will update you next week on how they turn out.