Final Reflection

I cannot believe that this is my final blog post for this class, it honestly does make me a little sad.  However, in a week I will be able to say with a sigh of relief "I have finished my first semester in the program!" 
Before the beginning of the semester I honestly thought that the arts consisted of drawing, painting, or coloring, and that my future students will be going to a specialty class for that particular part of their learning.  However now I understand that not only is it extremely important to integrate the arts into everyday curriculum but also that the students LOVE it and it makes learning fun, new, and exciting for them.
When I was in second grade I remember we had a substitute at my school that could tell the most amazing story about a little old lady and pig.  I actually looked forward to the days when my school teacher would be gone (my teacher did very little with the arts in my classroom because as I mentioned above my school had an art specialty class) so that this particular substitute would be able to tell us the story.  I don't want my students to feel the way I felt about my teacher about me, so I want to incorporate arts into as much of my curriculum that I can.  I know that this will be time consuming for me, but it will benefit my students immensely.

Integrated Teaching

We are down to the wire now.  There is one more week of classes then it is finals and depending on how that goes I will finally be able to say with a sigh of relief that I have officially completed my first semester in the Elementary Education Program (yahooooooooo!!!!!!!!)
After having the opportunity to be inside an elementary classroom I have come to understand why it is so important that we learn to integrate the arts.  Learning is something that young students need to learn to love and embrace the arts allow students the opportunity to do this by giving them to opportunity to express themselves freely in a way that may not have been able to do otherwise.  The major problem however, is that many times schools cannot afford or do not find it necessary to have an arts program in their facility and that is where we as future teachers need to step up our game and find ways to bring in the arts.  Show students how thy can move their bodies like a tornado or how they can act out the signing of the Decleration of Independence.  Students learn from these experiences and they are most likely the ones they are going to take with them.

Final Week in Field

You know what is awesome? When I get my blogs mixed up and post the wrong blog for the wrong class. 
This past week was such a hard experience.  I had no clue it was going to be that difficult to say goodbye to my students!
For art this week the students have continued working on their giant puzzle pieces.  Some of them were turning out very well.  The art teacher was very particular on how she wanted the students to finish their pieces.  Each piece had to be checked off by her, and if it did not fit to her expectations then the students were sent back to their desks and had to make the corrections then return to her for approval yet again.
I was so proud of the students, they were really trying their hardest.  I only wish that I could be there to see the final result.

Week Three in Field

This was our third and final week in field for the semester.  I do not even know where the time went!! I loved being in the classroom and working with the students, all of the observing in the world could never prepare someone for the actual experience of teaching.  I have a new found respect for full time teachers.
This week we continued working with the students on their mountain men presentaions.  Since the school uses MAC's rather than PC's the students were using a presentation program called key notes, one that I was not familiar with but seemed similar to Powerpoint. 
I really enjoyed my experience, and now am looking forward to Spring semester field.  However, I do not know if I could ever love the students as much as I did this semester :).

Week Two

Another week has come and gone, it makes me so sad how fast the time is flying.  I LOVE working in the schools, it reminds me that this really is what I want to be doing. 
The class was a little rowdy this week, on Monday Mrs. Martin had a substitue which did not go very well.  However, as the week progressed and Mrs. Martin returned to class the students seemed to calm down some. 
For Art this week the students got to attend their weekly art class where they did sand carvings (the students have been learning about the Native American Indians).  The students really seemed to enjoy it and their work turned out really neat.
We also started teaching this week and for one of our art intergraded assignments we had the students color and label a giant mountain man.  We finish teaching this next week, we will also complete our art intergraded work, hopefully all goes as planned!!

First Week in Field

We are finally into the schools and I LOVE it!  At the beginning of the week I was terrified to enter the schools because it was the beginning of the rest of my carreer.  However, by the end of the first day I realized why I am going into Elementary Education. The students are so eager to learn, during my observation hours Mrs. Martin teaches math.  It is so fun to watch the students faces as they begin to understand and grasp the concepts that are being taught. 
It is really to see if any of the arts are being intergraded into the classroom only being there for 3.5 hours a day.  The school also has speciality classes one of them being art so we do not get to see the students actually working on their art.  However, in the classroom the students have been learing about the Native American Indians.  Hanging on the walls in the classroom are several drawings of Native American dwellings.  Also part of the fourth grade curriculum is learnin the counties and they have made salt dough maps of the state of Utah.
We beging teaching our lessons next week and I am really looking forward to it, hopefully by then, we can find a fun way to incoporate some of the arts into the classroom.

Music Presentations

For one of our final presentations, we chose to use 4th grade curriculum and teach the students about the pioneers traveling west.  The song we chose to incorporate was "The Farmer in the Dell".  For the most part I felt that our  presentation went smoothly.  However, it being the week before field work I felt that it was quite obvious that all of our minds are a bit pre occupied.
That being said though I felt like the groups did a great job, especially the group that had their entire lesson plan re written for them while presenting I thought they handled the situation very well.
After seeing everybody's presentations it makes me excited to one day be able to incorporate music into my daily classroom, because I feel as though it can be extremely beneficial to students, and allows them to understand the information/curriculum in a fun and new way.

Teaching with Music

We have finally reached a unit that I would feel comfortable incorporating into my classroom.  I think song is extremely beneficial to students and in some cases delivers the information and helps the students retain it better than if they had read it from a text book.  I remember when I was in high school and I had to memorize the pre-amble to the Constitution for my U.S. Government class.  Thank  you to School House Rock I can still remember the pre-amble:).
Although I am not very creative at coming up with new words for songs, I am really excited for our presentation this week.  In our classroom management class Anne Adamson suggests that one of the best ways to control the classroom is to teach the students new songs, that allow them to get up out of their seats and moving.  She claims that this allows children to get a little break from their learning, and allows them to get some of their extra energy out.
Field starts in about a week, and hopefully I will get the opportunity to incorporate some of the units we had discussed this far in the semester especially song.

Dance Presentations

As I mentioned in my previous post, dance is not something that I feel extremely comfortable with.  However, after today's experience I have found a new love for dance that I never knew existed. 
I really do feel that everybody did a great job with their presentations today, but the group that really caught my eye was the Tornado group.  I loved the idea where they had us make a tornado it was original.  For me as a visual learner, I know without a shadow of a doubt, this activity would have helped me to remember the three different parts of a tornado.
Something else that made me feel more confident in my dance is when at the end of class you told us about the male teacher who like myself did not feel comfortable in teaching his young students about dance.  He began teaching his students dance by reading directly from a text book and telling rather than showing the students what they were supposed to be doing.  Now after several years he is one of the main promoters for incorporating dance into the everyday curriculum.  At this point in the lesson I had to smile and say to myself "There is hope for me."

Dancing

Growing up, my sisters and I would spend countless hours dancing around our house.  This and my elementary school annual dance festival were the only forms of dance that I participated in growing up.  Needless to say I am not very comfortable when I dance so this is one unit that I have been weary about. 
However, in class on Thursday I thought that it was a fun idea to correlate the students emotions with the book "Where the Wild Things Are".  I also liked the idea of reading students a book (in our case it was Water Dance by Thomas Locker) and allowing students to use props to imitate what was happening in the book.  Although I did not feel entirely comfortable with this activity I know it is something that students would love to do.  My favorite activity was the folk dance, and once we got the hang of it, it was fun to listen to the rhythm of the music so we could pick up on what was going to happen next.
Being able to correlate dance into the curriculum I can tell takes a very creative person.  However, I think it would be well worth the effort and time because it is something that students would really enjoy.

Drama Presentations

As I mentioned in my last post I love that drama allows students the opportunity to express themselves that they may not have otherwise been able to do so in a classroom setting.  I also thought that everybody did a great job in presenting their drama lesson plans.  However, my fear came true when groups began presenting and after about the third group the lessons began to repeat themselves.
I really do think that drama offers experiences to students who don't know how else to express themselves.  I however do think that teachers need to be careful in how often they incorporate  drama because a lot of students may not feel comfortable "acting" in front of their peers. 
I also think that as future educators it is our responsiblity to inocoporate as many of the arts into our classrooms as possible!

Drama

Growing up I was always a shy student, so whenever we had the opportunity to act something out in class it would make me so nervous that I would dread going to school the day of our performance. 
While I agree that it is fun for students to be able to play around and get their wiggels out I think that we also need to realize that not all students are going to enjoy expressing themsevles in that form of art.
I am excited to one day incorporate drama into my future classroom because as I have mentioned before I think it is an excellent way of giving students a chance to "breathe" while still doing something productive.  However, I think that I will also try my hardest to incorporate the other arts as well for my students who may not feel as comfortable acting in front of their peers.

Principles of Visual Arts

As I have mentioned in my previous posts I have always enjoyed art.  So getting to discuss art in class was like stepping back into high school.  I loved looking at the paintings and being able to discuss them as a group and as then as a class. It was fun to see and hear how differently we interpret art work. 
It is never to early to introduce children to the arts and what better way to do that then though children's books.  We begin reading to children from the time they are born so why not introduce them to the pictures in their books as well.  Allowing children to be exposed to art at a young age helps students to pay more attention to the details and to notice things that they may not have noticed other wise.
The best way to do this is by exposing students to as many things as we can.  Read them books, take them to musems, encourage as much art exposure as possbile in the school.  The students may not notice if it is there, but they will deffinatley notice if it is not there.  Also, allowing students to experience art first hand will enourage them to explore there creative sides.  All students have a creative side and we as educators need to encourage them to discover it.

Visual Arts

With todays activity where a partnership would take turns explaining to each other what they were to draw, it made me realize that visual art is all in the perspective.  Something else I realized is that children's picutre books are a form of visual art. 
As a future educator I have always thought that Picasso was for art and Polacco was for literature, but I love that the text found a way to incorporate the two catagories into one.
I found that todays class experience with the rotations was an excellent way to get students involved.  It kept the students active and curious as they were able to look around at the work their classmates were doing.  And the best part was...there was no right way to do any of it,  Every student was able to express themselves in a way that he or she wanted to. 
So what does this mean for me as a future educator?  That is why I am begining to love this class!  It is teaching me that no two students are the same and because of that there is no one way to teach a student.  Also allow the students to use as many types of art materials that they can get their hands on.  Art is a way of expressing themselves so don't limit a student to just markers and crayons!

So what about art...

Growing up it was always my dream to become an artist.  Does this mean that I can draw? Yes.  Does it mean I do it well? No. The basic school curriculum was something that was always hard for me.  I enjoyed writing but other then that I had a hard time concentrating on the other subjects.  Art was the one class that I enjoyed. 
When I was in third grade my core teacher happened to be the art speciality teacher up until that year, so she worked very hard in incorporating the arts into the classroom.  We also had a teacher who was from Hawaii and worked very hard in teaching us songs and dances from the Islands. 
I have always believed that art is something that is near impossible to be bad at.  Art is about expressing yourself so how can you be bad at doing that?  However, when most people think of art they think of being able to paint, sculpt, or draw well.  In my future classroom I hope to be able to instill in my students that while some people do excel in that area that being able to write a poem, perform a dance, or sing a song is also a form of art that students need to learn to embrace.