adventuresinarteducation

[adventuresinarteducation]

Elementary School!

Hey everyone!

I’ve just finished observing my first week at my elementary school placement! So far, this school is very different from the middle school. For one, they’re a lot more strict with behavior in both the classrooms and the hallways- for example, when students are passing in the hallways to get from one class to the next, they have to walk one tile away from the wall with their arms crossed and their mouths holding an imaginary bubble, so they stay quiet. Very different from how rambunctious the middleschool was!

That said, while this kind of rigidity doesn’t exactly sit well with me, I can see why it’s needed. This school has a lot of behavioral problems, from students sassing teachers to students starting actual fights in the classrooms and the hallways as they pass other classes. I’ve seen some really messy things this week- like the second grader who ripped up his art project during critique, dropped it on the floor, and told the teacher that “if you want it so bad you can pick it up yourself, like a dog!” and then as he was leaving the classroom to go to the office, poked his head back in only to snarl “you’d better have a collar on your neck when I get back!”

Folks, this was a second grader. He couldn’t have been more than seven years old. I was definitely shocked, and a little apprehensive about how takeover will be for me as an unknown element that the students will no doubt try to test to see what they can get away with.

To make matters even more nervewracking, I’m jumping right into teaching next week- by introducing a new project to the second grade classes! As there are five days in a week and four second grade classes, and our schedule is on rotation, Meaning that if Monday is A-day, then Tuesday is B-Day, Wednesday is C-day, and Thursday is D-Day before finishing Friday with A-Day again and starting next week with B-Day, I will have different classes on different days of the week and the classes will all be at different stages of the project at different times.

Plus, as a person who needs to interact with a class daily for about two weeks to get everyone’s names totally solid, this makes it extra difficult for me to learn names, since I won’t even have the benefit of seeing the same kids on the same days of the week due to the rotation schedule!

I think overall this placement will be really tough, but also really informational. At the very least, I think I’ll learn a lot about classroom management here, which is definitely something important to learn!

Well see how it all goes moving forward from here. As stunned as I still am over some of the misbehavior I’ve already seen, I’m looking forward to next week.

I’ll do my best!

#student teaching #elementary school placement

[adventuresinarteducation]

Week 7&8

Welp, I completely forgot to make a post last week. Oops.

Anyway, a quick rundown: Seventh grade began and is still working on the Storybook Collage project I mentioned in my Week Six post. This is a project where they picked one out of several fairy/folktales (Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Cinderella, and The Three Little Pigs), and made a drawing of a scene from their chosen fairytale. They made two drawings, either both from the same fairytale, or two drawings from two different stories. After they made a complete picture, including a character and a background that could be identified as belonging to their respective stories, they chose the one they most wanted to make as a collage, and began redrawing the image in larger, stronger paper that they would then collage over. Both the initial drawings and the larger, cleaner drawing if the sketch they chose to make as a collage took some time, as the students had one day off of school during week Seven, and two days where my co-op teacher was absent and had promised all the grades that they could watch a movie over those two days with the substitute teacher.

This was really frustrating actually, because I hadn’t bee informed that the school had the day off, and while I’d been able to plan somewhat around not getting ANY work done for the two days my co-op teacher would be gone, suddenly I had three days cut out of all my lessons that I hadn’t anticipated when making my lesson plans earlier on in the placement.

Part of the reason this is such a big problem is because of the 6th grade classes, which I’m filming for my edTPA video. The project I designed for them has two stages, first a map-making lesson followed by a monster-field guide/creation lesson, separated by a mini-lesson/worksheet on drawing monsters and what makes a monster in between the two stages. And since the students have now lost three work days, I’ll have to stay an extra week at this placement just so I’ll be able to get my filming done and the project wrapped up. Plus, there’s a national holiday next week, so we only have fours days to wrap everything up! I wish I’d been told about all these days off early in the placement. I hadn’t expected to need next week, but now I do and it’s a shorter week to boot!

Luckily, my next placement at an elementary school starts in two weeks, rather than next week, so I don’t have to make any additional arrangements to stay a little longer at the middleschool, but I’m still really frazzled about this.

Next week then will just be finishing up the projects to the best of all our abilities, and getting my filming done for the edTPA. Oh boy. Wish me well!

#student teaching #Middle school placement

[adventuresinarteducation]

Week Six

Week Six is over, and only two more to go!

This week, my seventh graders worked on hand-painting their prints, which I think I mentioned in my last post. After they made all their prints, I showed them examples from when prints were hand-painted rather than printed in layers of color, and so I had my students choose their top two or three prints (depending on how many prints they actually made, this may have been more or less) and set those aside to remain clean. Then, they used watercolors and painted in the rest of their prints! There was mixed success here, because a few students just painted a single wash of color over the whole thing and proclaimed themselves done, but a few others followed what I’d shown and demonstrated for them and took care to paint in the different parts of their designs in different colors, giving thought to what colors might look good together and blending their own colors to get more variety from what’s in the watercolor paint trays.

It was a fun way to end the project, and I think the easygoing, simple use of watercolors was good for the students after how specific and intensive the steps for printmaking were. So, the students were able to finish all their prints, and then had a more relaxed time painting in some of the prints they thought didn’t turn out so well, which made those prints into beautiful works of art of their own right! A successful project, I think.

Next week, they’ll start a collage project I’ve dubbed the “Storybook Collage”, so I’ll write more about that as it happens! And, I’ve realized I’m lacking a bit in taking photos of the students’ work- that is to say, I’ve completely forgotten about it until just recently. Partly it’s due to how hectic class can get, I can’t find a moment to pull out my phone to snap a few pictures, but hopefully I’ll remember to start taking pictures in the 30 seconds of breathing time I find sometimes going forward.

The 8th graders started their own watercolor project this week, just a simple exercise is using color to blend other colors by painting in a color wheel. We gave them the three primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) and taught them about primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. They’ve been working on painting in the colors of the color wheel by mixing their paints to get the different colors, and have been met with some success. Some students were confused and painted all the circles of the wheel in yellow, as this is the method that my co-op teacher showed them to make the orange, green, yellow-orange and yellow-green colors: put down a layer of yellow first, then the darker colors (i.e. red or blue) on top of the yellow layer in order to get the blended colors. Some students mistakenly painted the whole wheel yellow though, and a few who decided to start with blue painted several more sections of the wheel blue than should have been, so many students had to start over in order to get a complete, accurate color wheel. They should be finished with that by this coming Monday, as that’s the last day we’ve planned for them to work on this exercise. I think that the vast majority, if not all, of them will finish, unless something happens that completely shatters their focus.

The sixth graders finished up their worksheets and exercises on the Elements of Art this week, and so I will be starting my own project with them this coming week! I’m excited, because this is the project I plan on filming a segment of for the EdTPA, but only being able to start the project in the Seventh Week makes me a little nervous, since I still need to get parent permission slips back from the students, and while the exact lesson I plan on filming comes in the middle of the project, I won’t be able to film until I get the vast majority of permission slips back, or otherwise have permission granted. I handed out the permission slips on Friday, and I asked for them to be back by next week Wednesday so I could start filming on Thursday and be all set and not have to worry about filming in Week 8 instead, but these kids have already proven to be messy with their papers and somewhat unreliable about keeping track of their projects, so I’ll just have to trust them and hope I get all the permission slips back in a timely manner!

See you next week!

#student teaching #Middle school placement

[adventuresinarteducation]

Week Five

Week Five at my middleschool placement has ended! And with that, I am more than halfway through. It’s been going so quickly, it’s hard to believe!

This week, my seventh graders finished etching their plates for the printmaking lesson, and moved on to making actual prints. A few of them thought that just making one print was the end of the project, so even though I’d given them a rundown of printmaking and how it’s a medium used to make multiple copies of an image, there was evidently still some confusion- or else they just weren’t listening, because there were only two students who didn’t realize we’d be making more than one print, and those two just happen to sit next to each other. Hmm.

Still, I think it will probably be a good idea to make it even clearer exactly what this project is about and what I’m looking for from them in the very first few days of the lesson, and then just keep reiterating these goals and expectations throughout. Something to change the next time I teach a project like this, I think.

The students had a blast making prints, and after the first few it was really cool to see how they took my advice and additional instruction on how adding more or less ink can make their prints turn out even that much clearer. A few of them experimented on their own with that as well, going from one extreme to the next until they could narrow it down to the perfect amount of ink to leave on their plates to get the print they wanted.

My plan was for each student to make at least ten prints of their design, but after working with these kids for so long I realized that it just wasn’t going to happen. I have my seventh graders first thing in the morning, and they come in still sleepy and disgruntled about being in school, and trying to get them to do work feels a little bit like trying to herd cats, so I dropped the amount of prints they had to make to five, with the hop that they could achieve two or three nice prints out of it. Once I dropped the requirement, several students were more willing to put in effort since the goal wasn’t quite so high, and were able to make five prints- though the degree of craftsmanship tended to vary with each. A few students who’d been moaning about having to do so much work actually ended up finding the repetitive steps soothing, and created more than the five prints I was looking for because they ended up in such a place of calm productivity that they were able to just keep working and stayed focused on their art. One student ended up producing thirteen prints! That was far and away the most though, as the next highest amount of prints made was eight, though several students shared that achievement.

Next week we’ll finish up this project with a mini-lesson on hand-coloring prints, and the students will get to watercolor a few of the prints they made! They seem pretty excited about this, as we limited the colors of ink they could use while printing to black or a medium purple, so as to cut down on squabbles over colors and to make clean-up easier. But next week they can use whatever colors they like, so they’re looking forward to it!

The 8th graders ended up starting a mini project, an accordion style book that they created by folding and gluing notecards together so that the plain side faced outwards. These books are about the Principles of Art, and following examples in a packet and that we’d projected onto the smartboard for them, they wrote down each principle of art on each “page” of their booklets, and then had to draw something that showed that principle in use. For example, most of them chose to start with a picture or symbol and then changed that symbol on each page to fit each Principle, from Balance to Emphasis, and so on. They’re definitely more invested in this project than in the perspective drawings they did last, so that’s a relief!

The 6th graders right now are also working on a project like the 8th graders’ accordion book, though this project is one that focuses on the Elements of art. They’re working on a worksheet that has the names of the Elements of art on one side, and a row of boxes following it from left to right. The students have been working on drawing and learning the elements of art through this worksheet, and they’re just about done! They’re working pretty diligently on it, which is great to see.

See you all next week!

#student teaching #middle school placement

[adventuresinarteducation]

Week Four

Alrighty, this past week I have just finished up my fourth week at the middleschool, and it was the first week I got to start implementing my own lesson plans, which was super exciting!

I’m starting with the seventh graders, and I’ve been teaching my co-op teacher’s lessons to them, often side-by-side with my co-op teacher because, as I mentioned in a previous posting, he doesn’t really use written out lesson plans and that makes it more difficult for me to take over his plans right away since I can’t read them or anything.

But, we finished up the shading practice and mini-project, which involved recreating one of several choices of black and white photographs or drawings of still lifes, and the students were getting pretty tired of being told they had to push their values even further to get deeper shadows and use an eraser or a white chalk pastel to regain the highlights. Many of them were getting pretty frustrated after a while, especially the ones who chose to work solely in graphite over charcoal, because at some point you really can’t get much darker with graphite, and the harder to push in trying the more chance there is to rip your paper, as a few of them discovered.

But since we’ve finished up that project, we’ve moved on to my drypoint etching/printmaking lesson!

To start with, I talked with them about designing an image for printing, and line quality (thickness of the line, different kinds of lines, so on). The students were given the choice of creating an abstract design, making a design out of a representational drawing, or making a fancy letterplate like the kind of illustrated lettering you might see in illuminated texts.

Most of them chose to do a letterplate, which was kind of fun because I had them give me several different examples of fonts and styles you could make letters in, such as bubble letters or graffiti-style lettering, and we drew examples for the class to see, as well as using a handout I made for them that included different kinds of fonts, as well as different examples of both abstract and representational designs.

So this week we made our designs as pencil drawings, and then flipped them and outlined them in sharpie/permanent marker to make the lines thicker and to make the letters read the right way when printed. It took a few days for them to finish their designs as I had them make one letter plate and one non-letter design, as well as a third design of their choice, before they picked from one of the three they made and transferred it to the plexiglass plate they’d be printing with.

They’ve only just about finished transferring the design onto their plexiglass plates with sharpie, and a few of them have started etching already, though most of them are going to start that next week.

We don’t have any real etching tools, though, so I had to get creative! I went to a local store and picked up some different tools that could create a good scratch, such as dental tools, a few screws that I wrapped in tape to protect their hands as they etched, a few actual needle-tip etching tools, and some needle clay tools as well. Due to the variety of tools, the students will be able to pick the tool that is both easiest for them to use, as well as that produces the kind of line they want while they etch.

Or at least, that’s the plan! We’ll see if any adjustments need to be made as more of them begin etching next week.

With the other grade levels, I am pleased to announce that the potential bullying situation I talked in sixth grade about last week is resolved. It appears as though the one student did get hit with a ball in gym, and that caused her to drop some papers she was holding, and the other student did laugh, but that the other student did not throw the ball nor did she invite other students to laugh. Overall, it was a combination of one student laughing at another’s misfortune, which triggered her lack of self-confidence and led her to believe that she was being mocked and ridiculed. Still, we’ve decided it will still be best to keep all the students involved separated, and will stick to our modified seating chart that does so.

The 8th graders are also very done with their perspective projects, both emotionally, physically, spiritually, so on and so forth. At this point, even getting them to add windows to the buildings they’ve drawn is like pulling teeth, so my cooperating teacher has decided that we’re just going to end the project with what we’ve got and start a new one on Monday, since we’ll get very little work out of them now. We’re not sure what that new project will be yet, but it’s definitely going to have to be more interesting and hands on- a complete 180 from the perspective drawings, basically. We’ll see what we can come up with on Monday.

#student teaching #Middle school placement

[adventuresinarteducation]

My cooperating teacher asked me if I could make a poster for Art Club, since it was supposed to start this past Wednesday. I whipped this out pretty quickly, since he asked for a “manga-like poster”, and that’s definitely something I know how to do! I think he wasn’t expecting something like this though- he was pretty surprised that I’d put so much effort into it, but if it gets the students’ attention and we have a good turnout for club, it will have been worth it!

Ultimately there was a scheduling conflict though, and so Art Club will start next week instead! I’m looking forward to it, since the kids have a lot more freedom in choosing what kind of artwork they want to make, and it will be fun to teach them various things outside of the assignments we’re doing in class!

#Middle school placement #Student Teaching #Art Club

[adventuresinarteducation]

Week Three

Alright folks, welcome back.

Week Three at my middleschool placement has just finished, and while not much happened, we did have several new students join one of our sixth grade classes and that led to a few problems. Two of my students were very upset about one girl who had just joined the class, and had to leave the room to speak with a counselor because they were crying and panicking very badly. I was able to speak with one of these kids in the hall before asking if they’d like to talk to someone else, and all I got out of it was that the new student had seemingly hit a ball into one of them in gym class, and then instigated laughter over it? I’m not entirely sure, as my student was difficult to understand through her tears, but it sounds like it could be a bullying situation, and that worries me.

I want all my students to feel safe and comfortable in the classroom, and suddenly two of my kids don’t seem to feel safe at all. I’ve talked with my cooperating teacher about what the one student was able to tell me, and we’ve already drafted a new seating chart to put them facing away from each other on opposite sides of the art room, as well as talked to some of the administrative staff about finding out what’s going on, and how to solve it. We’ll see how it goes from there.

Beyond the problems cropping up in sixth grade, this week was pretty calm! The 8th graders are as rowdy as ever, and don’t really enjoy the project we’re doing with them (basic 2-point perspective scenes of a street and some buildings they get to design), but we’ve only just started it so we’ll see if we can ping their interest a little more going forward. I think a lot of it is that they don’t have the patience to measure out straight lines and perfect perspective, which is fair because I find measuring out every line to be exact is quite tiring for me too. I’ll see if I can come up with some ideas that might make it more interesting, and then I’ll suggest them to my co-op teacher to see if he thinks any of them might help the 8th graders get more invested.

With seventh grade, my co-op teacher is finishing up a project/ worksheets with them about shading and 3D shapes, and then next week I get to start teaching them my own lesson plans, which is really exciting! I’ll be doing a project on drypoint printmaking, which is a little difficult but I think is something that could be really fun for them. Printmaking has a lot of steps to it, but once you’ve done them a few time it becomes easier and you’re able to start making more and better quality prints, and I think the students seeing just the sheer volume of work they are able to create will be interesting, since they mostly focus on creating single works of art over a collected series.

#student teaching #Middle school placement

[adventuresinarteducation]

Week Two, Done!

Alrighty, I am please to announce that Week Two of my middleschool student teaching placement has officially ended! And overall, I think things have been going very well!

General impressions are largely the same as last week’s- the 8th graders are a tough bunch to handle, though I’m starting to make connections with a few of them so that should help a bit. 

The seventh graders are a generally chill bunch, and are some of the smaller class sizes too, especially with several students dropping art after week one. They tend to work quietly and well, and they actually ask for help or clarification when they need it, which is awesome! I love working with the seventh grade classes, because they really do see me as a legitimate resource for learning and that’s great!

The sixth graders are still having some problems focusing, but they’re all new and young yet, and I think with careful planning we should be able to get them settled in all right. I’ve taken my own experiences with ADD into consideration when looking at ways to help redirect their attention, and I’ve been doing some research on methods to help improve or redirect focus, but a lot of the material I look at seems to be either for only a single child with specific attention struggles, or on classes of very young students. I’m looking into more examples of dealing with adult ADD/ADHD to help my students, and there are some good tips there that my cooperating teacher and I have been trying out, but there isn’t much to be found about middle schoolers anywhere. As my co-op teacher said, “nobody cares about middle schoolers”, to which I find myself sadly in agreement with.

This next week, Week Three, I will be teaching my co-op teacher’s lessons while we go over ideas I have for my own lesson plans. He doesn’t really subscribe to the idea of written out, structured lesson plans which will certainly make this week interesting, but I’ve taught on the fly before and so long as I make sure to discuss with him what he expects/wants the students to learn, things go perfectly fine.

In general, I really like my co-op teacher. I feel like he works and thinks in a way similar to myself, especially regarding teaching styles and organization and even why we teach, and I’m mostly just glad that I’m able to lay out what I need from him to succeed in this placement and for him to take me seriously.

I’m looking forward to finally taking a more active role as teacher this coming week, and in Week 4 I’ll actually be implementing my own lesson plans and ideas, so look out for some new LPs to be posted up soon! Specifically, I think we’ll be focusing on printmaking at my co-op teacher’s request, and I love printmaking and have studied (and even taught!) a few different ways to make really fantastic prints before. It’ll have to be a lot more low-tech than I’m used to (no printing press, basically) but I’ve seen some clever ways to get around that already and I look forward to implementing them, so keep an eye out for those!

#Student Teaching #Middle school placement

[adventuresinarteducation]

Week One, Finished!

As of today, Friday August 19th, I have finished my first week in my middle school placement for Student Teaching! Technically, I’ve only been in my school working with students since Wednesday, which was the first day of school for the students, but I’ve been attending teacher meetings since Monday as well, so I’m counting this week as the Official Week One since it was the first week in my placement, even if it wasn’t spent entirely with students in the classroom.

That said, it was certainly an interesting week.

As it’s a middle school, rather than teaching classes based on subject like in high school, we teach by grade level. As such, we start the day with a long first period spent as a planning period, then second and third period are both back to back classes of 7th Graders. The 7th graders in general to be pretty chill, and while definitely chatty they’re also open to instruction, and I think classes have gone well with them so far and will continue to go pretty smoothly.

Fourth period is an abnormally long period, as it’s used as a meeting period for the arts and gym classes to gather and discuss needs and development for their classes. I don’t have much to do during this time, as a lot of it involves the teacher union and what the school can do for the teachers as they’ve previously asked for various things, but it’s still very valuable to sit in on those meetings and get an understanding of how the whole department of classes outside of core classes runs.

Then, fifth period. Oh boy. Fifth period is our first class of 8th graders, and they are a rowdy, squirrelly bunch. I’ve heard from other teachers that their whole grade level has been tough customers ever since they came in as 6th graders, and I can definitely see how this could be the case, as they tend to be loud, abrasive, and very resistant to instruction and teacher interaction. Coming after the generally chill 7th graders, this was kind of a shock, to be honest! I’m a little worried about discipline problems with this class, as even this week we’ve had to make several calls home and even write up some Level One discipline infractions. Hopefully going forward it’ll be a little better, so fingers crossed!

Sixth period is lunch, which I’m both grateful for (because at this point in the day the hunger is gnawing at my bones) and a little dazed by, because we have the shock that is the 8th grade class, then food which tends to make both me and my cooperating teacher sleepy, followed by the other, equally rambunctious 8th grade class to complete the dazed-and-confused sandwich.

Seventh period, then, as mentioned, is the second class of 8th graders. The class size itself is also one of our bigger ones, and it’s difficult to find a good seating plan because these kids will talk with anyone, and have no compunctions about talking across the room to their friends either, which raises the noise level to unacceptable degrees. Overall this class is very similar to 5th period, so I don’t have too much more to add here.

Eighth and Ninth period are both classes of our 6th graders. I’m grateful to announce that our 6th graders, while definitely showing some focus issues, are much more receptive to instruction and teacher interaction than the 8th graders, and are roughly as chill attitude-wise as the 7th graders. I’ve found that I’ve had the most success connecting with the students in these two classes, partly because they’re so willing to talk about their interests and what they want from art class, but also because a lot of what they’re into these days (cartoons, video games, various book series) are also all things that I love and enjoy, and so it’s fun to pop into one of their conversations and see their faces when they realize that I not only know what they’re talking about, but enjoy it too. It’s actually helped me make some points more clear for them, because I can incorporate things I remember from those cartoons/books/video games that can be examples of whatever we’re learning in class that day.

Overall, I’m really enjoying this middle school placement. Though I generally consider middle school to be a cesspool of evil and a place of horror, and my opinion hasn’t changed overmuch, I am having a much better time working with these students than I thought I would. With any luck, the rest of this placement will go just as well as this week has, and I’m looking forward to next week! :)

#Student Teaching #Middle school placement

[adventuresinarteducation]

STUDENT TEACHING!

Hi everyone! As a new student teacher, there are a lot of things I’m going to be learning and experiencing over the next eight weeks in my first placement at a high school, and then in the next 8 weeks after that in my second, elementary school placement. 

This blog is going to be a collection of daily updates about my experiences and the work I do as a student teacher starting tomorrow, my first day of actual teaching in the classroom. Though this is my second week in my placement already, the first week was an observation week, so I could get used to my cooperating teacher, the school, the expectations of the job, and the students in all my classes.

In a few minutes I’m going to post an overall update of how that first week went, but I’d just like to use this post to welcome you all to my recounting of my student teaching experience!

#Student Teaching #High School placement