On reflection my most valuable experiences at Stout have always been my practicum.  This experience at the elementary level is no different.  As a student I always have an idea of what I want my classroom to look, how I want it to operate and what I would do if certain difficult situations arise.  Actually being in a classroom and seeing how another teacher operates their classroom helps me to define these ideas. Even more importantly I get to see what happens when I try some of teaching techniques on a classroom full of students. It is often said that artists are visual learners I have to disagree while I learn by seeing I learn more by doing, by putting pencil to paper, hands to clay, and paint to canvas.  Learning to teach is no different for me.  I can talk and theorize about how to teach, but actually seeing how a child responds and making adjustments as I go is what really helps me to develop.  To actually be able to see what kind of projects are appropriate for different grade levels.  To know how students struggle to master skills and ways to make it easier for them to understand a concept.  These are things that can really only be learned by working with kids.

I also received a ton of valuable lesson plan ideas, inspiration for how to create a better anticipatory set and procedures to help me better manage my classroom.  Mrs. A often used artist to inspire her lessons such as Monet's water lilies, Klee's cat and bird or Klimt's the cradle.  She also was very animated when introducing a project during a lesson on the scream she actually did scream for the students.  I don't know that I will get that into my teaching, but the students were held in her spell as she told stories about the artist and art work that served as inspiration for the the students.  She also had procedures in place for clean up and for how the students were to line up as they left. I think that the students need to be reminded to take turns and to walk to their tables, but in general the students were well behaved.

The only thing that I wish I had seen included in the class a little more than it was is an introduction to aesthetics and art criticism.  I think that this would be pretty hard at the fist grade level, but at least the students could be asked to talk about what they had made.  the colors they chose or the people and animals they included in their work. I think by 5th and 6th grade the students could be expected to describe what they did and how they would change it if they could start over again.  In general I want my students to practice talking about art.

I wish I had more practicum experiences.  I wish I could try teaching my brown bear lesson again with a better plan in mind for clean up and more of a focus on helping the students to understand textures.  I'm excited to student teach and put all that I've learned in this experience into action.  I'm also excited to see what more teaching holds for me.

I think Tray was one of my favorite speakers this semester.  Mostly because I'm a little nervous for my student teaching experience.  I just wanted to know what someone else had experienced and how things worked for them.  I appreciated the fact that his experience maybe wasn't the best that's OK, because it showed me that even though your experience may not be ideal you can work through it. 

I also appreciated the lesson plans that he allowed us to borrow.  He had several very good ideas and I hope to try some of them out.  I especially would like to try the letter monsters those looked really cool and like they were a lot of fun to create.

I'm still not really sure what will be expected of me during student teaching, but I do understand that it will be a lot of work.  I had been planning on creating several lessons over the summer to help me prepare for student teaching.  After hearing him talk I will be creating even more lessons than I had originally planned. I will also be getting a few books to help inspire some projects.  Stout teaches you a lot of fine art techniques, but I know there are materials and techniques that aren't taught here that I would like to teach to my students such as calligraphy or weaving. 

Student teaching sounds like a lot of work, but a great learning experience.  I'm looking forward to it with excitement and trepidation.

This post is specifically to address some of the questions that I may have missed in some of my other blogs.  Mrs. A classes were generally well behaved, but there was one particularly that seemed to give her more trouble than others.  I'm not sure if it was the mix of students or if the teacher generally in charge of them was a little more laid back with classroom management.  Mrs. A general would ask the students to give her five and did a fair amount of waiting for the students to stop talking and start listening.  She did have an area of the room designated for a student to work by themselves if they were giving another student trouble.  If the situation warranted it she would send the student to the office for a set period of time.

Her rules were the same as the rest of the schools they were posted in the room.  The students were asked to be respectful, do the right thing, and solve the problem is they created one in the rules.  There were no rules posted about safety issues within the classroom.  Mrs. A addressed safety concerns primarily by making sure that her projects were designed to be safe for the student.  If there was any potential for a safety issue she would address that when giving a demonstration but that very rarely happened.


Students were allowed to go to the bathroom or get a drink one at a time after they requested the break from Mrs. A.  Mrs. A did not have a hall pass the students were simply allowed to leave after given permission.  This was an elementary school so the students were not allowed to borrow materials, none the students had ipods or phones that Mrs. A had ever seen in her classroom.  The radio remained off for the class Mrs. A allowed the students to talk while they worked and keeping the radio off helped her to hear the classroom discussions.

I asked Mrs. A if she had to turn in lesson plans to her principle.  The principle did ask for lesson plans from all of the teachers, but as Mrs. A spent more time at this school her lesson plans had become shorter and shorter.  She did show me what she turned in it was basically a chart with the time and grade of every class laid out and the name of the project that class was working on.  If Mrs. had to be gone for a class she had a sub station with detailed lesson plans for each grade that the sub would follow.  Then when Mrs. A came back she would pick back up on the project that she had been working on with the class and leave the sub project to be completed when their was a sub again.  I don't think that it would be necessary to do this though at the high school level

Hours 14 and 15

Mrs. A asked me to grade the Brown Bear Projects.  This was harder than I anticipated, partly because I didn't have the rubric I created for the project with me and partly because I didn't want to down grade the students for things that I felt I had made unclear to them.  Mrs. A generally grades her students work by giving the student a 1, 2 or 3.  3 is the highest grade that you can receive in a class her class.  She sorts all the art work into piles the represent the different grades and then considers if she should move anything.  I new I was partially grading the student on craftsmanship I wanted the shapes to be cut out in the forms that I had demonstrated to them and all of the edges of the shapes glued down.  I wanted them to have given their brown Bear's certain features.  The problem that several of the students had was that they had cut their brown bears bigger than what I asked for and some of the bears legs were hanging of the background page.  I debated about whether or not I wanted to down grade the students for this but I determined that the problem was one of my own making because I hadn't made it clear enough to the students that they shouldn't let any part of the brown bear hang off the page.  I'm looking forward to getting a little more experience at grading.

Mrs. A also started a new project with her 1st grade students.  They began weaving cups into baskets.  Mrs. A had cut seven slits into the cup and showed the students how to weave the yarn through the teeth that she cut.  The students then began working at their tables.  Some of the students had a really hard time figuring out how to weave the yarn around the cups.  The other problem students had was pulling their weaving tight.  Mrs. A said she usually tugs on their shirt to show them how tight they need to pull the yarn.  I had a hard time getting the students to really pull hard enough on their yarn.  I saw a few cups were the student had woven the cup pretty far, but failed to pull the yarn tight enough.  I wasn't really sure if I should pull out all the work they had done and ask them to work the yarn again.  Now that I've thought about it a little more I think that in the future I would take one strand of yarn out and have them weave it a little tighter leaving the loser stuff below. they could have on the last day the option of weaving a second better cup after they had mastered the skills on the first cup.

Hours 12 and 13

So I finished teaching my lesson plan to the students today.  I ran through my head a couple of times and sort of talked myself through it the night before.  I wanted to make sure that I organized how I wanted the students to work and what words I was going to use to guide them through the process of creating the brown bear.  I started out the class by asking them to tell me what artist we looked at before break.  I gave few hints and it all came back to them.  I also asked them to tell me what a texture was.  They had a little trouble defining the word.  I think if I really wanted them to understand texture I would have to do more than one project that centered around the idea.  Then they were dismissed to their tables and I asked them to write their names on the back of their papers.  I still had a few papers with names on the front.  I think next time I'll wait until were done with the project and then ask them to flip the paper over and hopefully all the names will be on the backs of the papers.  The students were really eager to get moving.  I had a few problems with students taking forever to get their supplies and then at the end they were fighting to get supplies put away.  At the end of the class when everyone was sitting down I let them know that I thought they did a great job when I asked them to come up and get their craypas, but that the struggle we had during clean up was unacceptable.  They sat quietly and lined up nicely for me after that.

I think clean up is kind of an issue for some of these classes.  I've seen students fighting and butting to get ahead of each other to get their items put away.  I think that Mrs. A doesn't notice it as much as I do because she is busy cleaning up herself.  It bothers me though.  I want clean up to be more orderly in my class and I want my students to me more considerate of each other.  I think that Mrs. A art bucks could be used to help address this issue.  At the beginning of class I would announce that art bucks would be awarded not only for drawings in sketchbooks but also for extra good behavior.  Such as helping a friend finish their project or if I spy them doing something I believe is particularly kind.

Below are a few pictures of some of the work the kids created and also a short clip of me giving a demonstration to the class.

I liked hearing Bob and Darrel talk.  It was apparent to me that they had an opinion, but were trying to be honest within there presentation.  I'm not sure that I really learned anything I wasn't aware of before, I've been thinking about the union issue for a while now.  My father is a teacher and when the Governor broke the teachers union he was of course upset.  We were upset because the union gives teachers the ability to negotiate things like their working conditions and pay even though they are not allowed to strike.  On the flip side there have been times where the unions power has been abused and I don't like some of the causes that the teachers union supports either.  It's apparent to me that there are two sides to the union coin.  I'm not really sure how to fix it so that the unions power will not be abused, but I also believe that unions can be good for more than just the teachers they represent they can also be good for the students too.

I liked the maps of the united states that showed the link between teachers unions and student ACT and SAT scores.  Maybe it's not solid proof that unionized teachers are better teachers but it does show evidence that this is probably true.  I'm not sure how long it will take, but I think that the education provided to students within the state of Wisconsin is not going to be as good as it was before the union was broke.  Not because teachers don't love kids or teaching, but because without the unions teachers are going to lose some of the working conditions that helped them be good teachers, such as smaller class sizes and prep time.  I hope I'm wrong.  I think most people will agree that we all want a great education for our kids we just don't agree on how to go about giving them that great education.

Hours 10 and 11

I couldn't complete my lesson this week with the first graders due to Easter break on Monday.  I did come to the school though on Wednesday and helped the fourth graders with their masks and the first graders worked on a drawing inspired by Klimt's the cradle.  I missed the introduction for this project. Talking with Mrs. A she had a power point with some of Klimt's paintings.  She felt that a lot of Klimt's work was inappropriate for this age group and had specifically chose the cradle painting because it was one of his more tame paintings.  I think that this is an interesting problem because there are a lot of great painters and paintings that you can't show to an elementary class.  Mrs. A even has a few art books designed for young children that she has had to alter some of the images because they were inappropriate for young children.  In the Klimt inspired drawings the students were allowed to pick some sort of character that would be sleeping under a blanket divided into sections and then the students decorated each section with patterns.  Today they were coloring in the patterned blankets with water color pencils.  Mrs. A demonstrated to the students how they could color lighter or darker to create more or less saturated colors.  Next week the students would be coloring in their drawings.

The fourth graders were working on building up features on their masks.  They added balls of newspaper, egg cartons and cardboard onto the base of their masks to create a nose, ears, or eyeballs that pop out.  The students did a pretty good job of doing this they did have a little trouble brainstorming ways to create the three dimensional form they wanted, this was most often fixed by just asking them what they were thinking of doing and then asking more questions and offering a few suggestions to help them think.