Family Art Day

This week for my art class, I worked on my plans for my Family Art Morning. For this, I am planning a morning where my art students and their families can come and have a collabrative art making experience. This was an idea from my host teacher. We are trying to create an art garden that is located on the grounds of the school, so while the weather is still cold we are making decorative items to be located around the garden. I am excited to see how this morning goes, but I also know that I am going to have to be open to flexiblity from my previous teaching experiences. I will update and let you all know how it goes!

Last week in my kindergarten art class, we made butterflies. This was a hit! We took two coffee filters and watercolored on them. Really they were just seeing how watercolors flow with water. The colors were so beautiful! After that, we took the two watercolored coffee filters and put them in a doll pin, and tada! we had a butterfly. I think the reason they really enjoyed this project is because they could relate to the object. They have seen butterflies before, and now they have made one! What a great feeling as an art teacher to see such shining faces.

Collages for Kids!

Being creative seems to be the best skill I was given in life! I mean, I use my creativity everyday. This week, I didnt know exactly how I wanted to use this certain lesson plan because it was created for 2-5 grade but it seemed so fun to do with kindergarten students. What I did was took the ideas from the unit and then created my own plan from that. We created collages, but instead of using media captions for the images we used shapes and practiced how they could be used. It was neat to see how a five year old sees shapes. My intention was to have them just overlap and create texture through shapes but some kids made images from shapes. One little boy made a robot from squares, triangles, and circles. Another little girl made a landscape and used triangle to create the sky! I also feel like I used my creativity to just let go and not tell them that I was really looking for an abstract piece, but just to let them do what they saw in their head. Its great to be in the field and learn these things for my self. All in all it was a great week in the kindergarten art world.

Heres a link the website I like to use to get some of my lesson plans from.

http://www.kinderart.com/

Pottery with five year olds!

This week in my art class we are learned how to make pinch pots. This seems like an easy task, but with a group of 20 kindergarten students, this can become quite the task. The main thing for me to remember was to keep the walls thick. What would be worse then coming back to a five year old and tell them their pot did not make it through the firing process? I have yet to see how the pots turned out after the fire, but I am sure they look great. Most of the pots looked great! Some of them were too wet, or thin which I decided to help them out by putting supporting clay on the walls because some students need a little help. All in all this project went great, but their were a few hurdles we had to jump for a successful project.

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.