Field Experience Reflection

Field was a great experience. I loved teaching our lessons. We taught on the branches of the government, we integrated art into our lessons twice. The first time was through drama. when we were teaching about the legislative branch, we had one child pretend to be a senator, while the rest of the class split into two groups one in favor of a law being passed and the other group was against. The "senator" walked through the two groups while they tried to persuaded the senator in their direction. We did this to show that a senator had a stressful job. This was very similar to the alley drama activity we did in class. The second time we have the children write a song about the branches of the government. The art activities were great and the students loved them. Our class also went to art once a week, they were working on paintings durning this time. We were also able to attend a play. These students have a great opportunity to experience art regularly 

Visual Arts Reflection

Visual Arts is my favorite of the fine arts we covered in class. I really liked the day in class when we went around to different tables and did shape, color, texture, ect. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot about using visual art in the classroom, I loved the painting you showed of the first grade class, it was amazing to see what they were capable of doing.  I also liked that the presentation of our author illustrator was different then a normal lessons we did in class. There were a lot of good ideas, I love children books and feel that there is a lot to learn from both the pictures and the text.

Music Reflection

Surprisingly  I am a fan of using music in the classroom. I think that songs can be a great way to memorize things. My group did a presentation on Columbus and we used a song that could help students learn facts about Columbus, a student may not remember anything about a lesson but they will remember then song and will always know that Columbus said in 1492. The presentation that stood out to me the most and was my favorite was the bamboo dancing. I thought that was really cool and I don't like dancing. I think music can be a great tool for teachers.

Dance Reflection

I was really impressed with the situations that the text gave, about dance influencing people. I agree that Dance is healthy and that children need to move around more during school, instead of sitting at a desk all day. I also agree that dancing can bring joy, I do feel that it can make some people feel very uncomfortable. I personally enjoy dancing but I hated making the poses in our class, I felt really stupid making them. I didn't mind doing the folk dance as a class, but I didn't like doing the geometry figures. I really can't see my self using dance very much in my classroom. I preferred drama.  Saying this I can see why dance specialist would focus on creative dance, it give the children a chance to express and solve problems in a different way.

Drama Reflection

      I liked the lessons we did in class incorporating drama into our lesson plans. I didn't realize how broad Drama is, I've learned that you don't have to put a play together to incorporate drama into your classroom. I also learned that drama can make everyday lessons exciting and fun for students. I love the game one of our groups played where they had the name on their backs and had to guess who they were by what the others in the group thought of them. It was really fun and you didn't have to be over the top to enjoy the game. I could picture a fifth grade class loving to play this game, it would be a great learning tool and would teach the children to befriend everyone on the classroom. Learning games such as this one could help eliminate "clicks" in your class. This is the type of strategies I will use in my classroom, another on I liked is where we had the 5 people up front in our class and we had to guess who they were. These fit my personally better then jumping up and down or dancing around like a flower or sun. This is a great class and it is definitely changing my thinking about the arts. I think it is great to integrate drama into other areas, its changes the fill of the classroom and will help students to learn more in other subjects.

Reflection # 1

Some things I learned so far: The importance of teaching and encouraging creative problem solving, why it is important to integrate art into you class. The difference =between teaching with the arts, in the arts and through the arts to name a few. Reading this chapter brought up some of the importance of being creative. The relation to creativity and work place and solving problems with our economy. I had never thought of how important creativity is to our society. Once it was brought to my attention, it made perfect sense, we need to creative problem solving at one time or another in all occupations. 

      I was surprised by the account of art based schools, it is amazing that they can show through these schools the success of integrating art into the classroom, I'm personally not an artsy person and do feel uncomfortable doing the activities in our class, yet I still think a class like the ones we read about would have been fun and beneficial even for me. I hope to learn more ways to integrate art into my own classroom and become comfortable enough to be able to implement what I've learned in my class. So far I really enjoy our class and have a completely new view on the arts.