Okay I am guilty of jamming
too many concepts at my students in this lesson that we did over the last 3 weeks. This is the first year that my district actually gave us a curriculum to follow. Or at least the first year that I was aware of it. Or maybe decided to follow it because of the
end of year exams. It includes scope and sequence? Yes, I looked it up, it has something to do with the ideas, concepts and topics to be covered. It includes units to follow and in what order. Which has really thrown me off this year. I would have totally set it up differently. Must have missed the memo to be included in that meeting. Sigh.......
Anyway I thought I would
attempt to follow the curriculum. But I'm
not happy........ I feel in some ways I have
lost the joy of what I do best. Every time I look at the curriculum I freeze up. Then I get it in my head to plow thought that stuff, and when I'm done, the fun can begin. Very silly, I know still working it out..... Let's just say my teaching style is old school and leave it at that.
So....... 3 weeks ago I started a project that included the following concepts: texture, mixing primaries colors into secondaries, and making a collage. Oh my!!
Week 1: Texture- I actually sat the students in a circle and passed around different textures for them to feel. I included a basket, cotton balls, hay, sandpaper, fake fur, fake leather (furniture samples that had some interesting textures) and lace. We looked at a poster of this painting (Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuniga by Goya) and talked about the difference between texture we can see and texture we can touch. Students were surprised that the subject of this painting is a boy-which led to another discussion on clothing and history. I still don't think they believed me...... about this being a boy. Oh and in the middle of this craziness I was observed! Got mostly
applying, one
innovative (passing around textures was a big hit), but I need to
develop my attention to scales... YIKES!
Students then worked on making a cornucopia using a basket pattern to show texture. (Oh my pattern-yet another concept I jammed in there....)
They also did some texture on some pre-cut leaves that I had leftover from the fall festival 2 years ago....
Week 2: Turning red, yellow and blue into orange, purple and green. I displayed a color wheel poster that I have and we went over all the colors and I explained the difference between primary and secondary colors. Then I modeled-which included me tracing, mixing and painting an orange pumpkin, purple grapes and green leaves. I showed them how to use the paint brush to make the purple paint swirl and make circles for the grapes. I did this with my kindergarten and 1st graders, so I was really impressed, they really rocked it! Check out those swirls!
Week 3: Putting it all together
or let's make a collage!
Finished projects-
Now mind you I was
SO focused on the concepts that I barely even mentioned Thanksgiving except maybe in regard to the cornucopia. So imagine my surprise when I asked my students what we learned about in art and was told
"we learned all about Thanksgiving and fall." Yeah.... I'm thinking I jammed way
too many concepts in this project. Time to slow down and have some fun!
Happy Thanksgiving and thanks for reading!
The problem seems to be when administrators are forced to evaluate us based on a classroom teacher rubric. We are expected to follow a lesson plan format that doesn't match the way we organize our curriculum. Now, the good thing about the curriculum we have in Duval Cty, is that our standards, higher level questions, and essential questions are written in and they are broad enough that you can work in what you want to cover. We have about half the learning block time as the grade level teachers, so things have to be adjusted as time allows.
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