As I was stepping into Nina's role while she was away for the last three weeks of the term, I had the opportunity to take over and run her art make it Monday focus group for their last three sessions.
We discussed together what the focus of the art sessions would be and talked briefly about creating a doc to plan the lessons out together. She would be taking the first day - so the set up stage and then I would be running with the rest of it. We thought culture would be a good starting point as that was the teams focus for the term.
So off I went home, and got so inspired by traditional tapa cloths and thought this would be a fantastic art project for the kids to do for make it Monday. I sat down and planned the whole unit and what I would do for each lesson - researched the traditional techniques and the symbols the Fijian/Tongan/Samoan cultures use to represent different things in their everyday environment. I shared the plan with Nina and thought i'd done a fantastic job . . . . until she messaged me back saying how great the unit was . . . . . . BUT - explaining the purpose of make Monday was for kids to lead the learning. For the lessons to go where the students wanted it to go, for the children to be inspired and to take it where they wanted it to go. So realistically you can't really plan ahead, you have to go where the students lead you.
Arrragh - I had a mini freak out - no planning! I'm such a structured, organised teacher. I like to know what we are doing way in advance and find it hard to go into a lesson with only a loose idea of where we are heading. So this was definitely a new and scary experience!
Nina set the scene with the group explaining the purpose and getting them to explore and discover different cultural artworks that they liked, using this as a inspiration for their own artwork they were going to create.
I then was there for the next lesson. I decided to start the day discussing art and symbolism. Also how each piece of art tells a story from the artist. We then relooked at our inspiration artwork from the previous week. We talked about how we were going to create our own artwork and the goal today was to create our draft sketches today. The structured, organised teacher couldn't help myself so we then create some success criteria together. See below:
During my first session, I got into a discussion with some of the group about Indian Ink. This group had no idea what this was, so the following session I got the children to experiment with Indian Ink. This was a good compromise for the structured teacher in me as it meant that I knew for at least the first 40 minutes the kids would be involved in this and I had some 'control' over the learning. This could also be a fall back for something the kids could continue with if they finished their own personal art piece early.
Positives:
- The kids were so inspired. I never had a child come up to me and say the dreaded "What do I do now?" They were so into whatever artpiece they were creating, and were so willing to experiment and try things.
- It was really awesome as a teacher to have the kids come up and ask advice about their artpiece and be able to offer suggestions without having a image in my mind of what it should roughly look like in the end. We could have some real indepth discussions about what could done and what the outcome might look like. Rather than asking me about whether their artwork looked 'good' etc, the advice I was giving was based around what the different art media would do - i.e. how chalk pastels would look and what type of paints should be used on a wooden surface etc.
Negatives:
- I was so tired!! Because each child is making something different, and using different media the demands on support to get what they need is really intense. Definitely no time to sit down! I wonder if there could be a way to make this run better?
- Even with all the inspiration and discussion on the focus for our artpieces there were still a couple of kids who just want to draw cute deer and didn't really understand how to create some kind of cultural aspect within their art pieces, or to use a cultural piece of artwork to inspire and shape their own. In the end i left these students to create what they wanted as it was supposed to be lead by them. However in this same situation next time I would have liked to find a way to inspire them to to create something a bit more cultural inspired.
Some images from the sessions:
Links to the registered teacher criteria:
Conceptualise, plan and
implement an appropriate
learning programme
- Through their planning and teaching, demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of relevant content, disciplines and curriculum documents
Promote a collaborative,
supportive and effective
learning environment
- demonstrate effective management of the learning setting which incorporates successful strategies to engage and motivate ākonga
- foster trust, respect and cooperation with and among ākonga
Demonstrate in practice
their knowledge and
understanding of how
ākonga learn
- enable ākonga to make connections between their prior experiences and learning and their current learning activities
- provide opportunities and support for ākonga to engage with, practise and apply new learning to different contexts
- encourage ākonga to take responsibility for their own learning and behavior
- assist ākonga to think critically about information and ideas and to reflect on their learning
Establish and maintain
effective professional
relationships focused on
the learning and well-being
of ākonga
- engage in ethical, respectful, positive and collaborative professional relationships with:
- ākonga
- teaching colleages
