Today's Lesson: In this lesson, students were asked to create an illustrated name tag where students drew their name and included characteristics to tell something about themselves. Students were given access to a variety of 2-D drawing materials, including watercolor paint, oil pastel, colored pencils, crayons and markers. Teachers introduced watercolor mixing techniques, rubbing alcohol, salt resist, and oil pastel to watercolor paint, after students investigated the dry materials first. In today's art exploration, students experimented with mixing materials to create new marks on their name tags. Essential Understandings:
Art can communicate ideas/characteristics about oneself
Artists combine materials to discover and create innovative marks
Experimenting with materials can create new insights on how to use materials
Outcomes - Students will be able to:
Make art that tells something about themselves
Identify materials and how they made marks in innovative ways
Mix colors to create new colors
Mix materials to create new marks
Skills:
Innovative ways of manipulating materials into something new
Creative problem solving
Complete documentation of this lesson can be found by clicking the image below!
Reflection: What worked well for this art experience? Why? In our first meeting, I felt that there were a number of things that went well for this experience for the students. In my opinion, the biggest success was providing the students with a variety of materials and watch them experiment with the different ways to make marks on their papers. The way in which our teaching group differentiated the art making process for students worked well, and something to continue to think about as we continue working with this group. The students had a variety of interests and abilities, so providing students with different ways to make marks definitely kept a high level of interest among the students. We had a number of students who wanted to make more than one drawing, and I thought that was great to watch. When considering this art experience through the lens of the Olivia Gude article, I thought this experience allowed students to investigate and make discoveries in their art making, as well as having students connect the work back to how it describes characteristics of themselves. With many of the students, they saw some unexpected possibilities with the materials they used, so that was another success with this meeting. What didn’t work well for this art experience? Why? For me personally, I had a lot of takeaways from this meeting. I was extremely nervous in the moments right before we started class, but once the students gathered and we started teaching, the excitement began. It was such a joy to work with and be around these students, it was a blast for me, and the students seemed to have fun too. One of my favorite moments from today came from the demo on watercolor techniques. When I sprayed the alcohol onto the watercolor and it reacted, the students I was working with immediately went “WHOA!” and that was pretty special. This experience reaffirms that I really love to teach students and watch them make art. Taking our lesson plan and putting it into action was really cool to see and do. I’m really excited to see what I am able to take away from this group of students as the semester continues. The aspect that I did not think work as well as we anticipated was the reflection discussion we prompted the students to do at the end of the class period. From what I observed the students discussed well with each other for a short time, but their focus shifted quickly once everyone shared. I think that we left too much time for this end activity, and the student’s attention quickly shifted to socializing with their peers. In the future I think it would be wise to reconfigure this process to keep student attention. What would you do differently? Why? This experience definitely gave me some insight for my future as an art educator. I think one of the biggest insights from today’s class was providing enough differentiation for students to tend to different learning abilities. I saw how important this became in the first meeting and differentiating my lesson plans in the future is something that I will be conscious of doing. Another thing that I took from today was responding to student art work. I tried to keep in mind our recent reading on this topic, but when being put on the spot by a student in the classroom, it was easy for “I like…” to slip out. As I work with students more and more, this is something for me to work on and develop as time passes. I am still in the process of learning the language of an art teacher. The final insight I will mention from this meeting is ways to make an introductory ice breaker more interesting and engaging for the students. Today I noticed during our ice breaker that it was easy for students’ attention to drift away from the task at hand. In the future when I meet students for the first time, it might me important to consider an activity that may involve students to move and interact more. Hopefully engaging students with movement instead of just staying in their seats could foster more interest and focus the class on the activity.