Week #5: The Classes are Mine!

Monday
Today was my last day of not having a full load of classes on my plate and I tried to milk it for all its worth (haha). I spent my planning period in the morning reviewing the lesson ideas that would start the next day with my teacher, making final adjustments and decisions and starting to gather materials. We then finished up the second day of our Monday classes lessons - which is class after class of very high energy students. I taught the collage lesson to our two fourth grade classes, and they finished up their wire sculptures and started scouring magazines for images that represented them. I think the 3rd and 4th round of teaching the personal collage lesson was the charm - the students have started looking for more than cars and their favorite animals; with a little encouragement they cut (and tear!) out words, colors and textures. I think it also helped while doing the introduction to collage to show them examples that my teacher and I had created - it let them see how their wire portriats would interact with a collage and what kinds of things they should put in their collage. As I was explaining the materials they would get to use in their collage, I was able to show them fabric, pictures, words, and colors that I thought described me and why. One girl even cut out a sunset because it reminded her of a special sunset in Florida during a family vacation - it was something that represented more that just a "like" to her! AWESOME!
I also taught the second part of my Frida Kahlo self-portrait lesson - this class was farther behind than my other classes because they had some major listening/behavioral problems last week. So I caught them up, monitoring their progress more closely this time and got everyone to a point that it would only take 10 min. at the beginning of their next class to finish adding color to their portraits. Once I got them to focus (and reminded them that art class is only once a week and only 45 min. - they needed to make the most of it!), the class really worked hard and I think the exaggerations of facial features they came up with are turning out great! After they finish them next class, I'll collect some to hang in the hallway!
Now to go prepare for the big day tomorrow ...

Tuesday
My teaher informed me today that you can often tell the weather by students behavior, its like they can sense a full moon or barametor changes or even snow and it comes through in lack of focus and too much energy. After today I believe her! I have rarely had problems controlling the classroom until today, part of that I think was finishing up projects and then transitioning to a new project ... the other part was them just bouncing off the walls!
Today was my first day of teaching all the classes in our schedule - I have officially taken over teaching pre-k through 4th grades. [The 5th grade is still working on a Chuck Close portrait lesson that will take will probably take one more class - so by the week after next, they will start a new lesson that my teacher and I will team teach (plaster masks - either carnaval or mexican style)]. It was a long long day ... I feel that tonight I'll be spending some time reworking parts of my lessons and thinking how I can teach certain things differently. The first class I had this morning was first grade and they are doing a lesson on seasonal landscapes. They had to finish their Modigliani portraits first - which took about 10-15 min., then as they were finishing my teacher let them freedraw until everyone was ready to start the new lesson together. It actually turned out to be a really great warm-up activity because she asked them to draw what they thought a landscape would look like - it really got them thinking about landscapes and gave me a good place to start talking them. I think the introduction to the lesson went really well; however, I'm going to do some research before tomorrow on different ways to teach drawing realistic trees to younger age groups. The Kindergarten lesson was an adventure - I must say their classroom teachers must be a special breed because I don't know how they do it all day! We did papercutting like Matisse - I need to figure out a faster way to go over the information so they can get to the doing more quickly - since they have so much energy and such short attention span. I need to work on showing my steps of doing things better and going mroe slowly so that the students don't get frustrated. My 2nd and 3rd grade lessons will also go through revisions as well - my teacher and I spent a little time critiquing during our last planning period. I need to reorder some things for tomorrow and learn to briefly explain the whole lesson and then explain other information as I go along so I don't loose their attention so quickly! Time to get to work and secretly cross my fingers for some snow (hehe).

Wednesday & Thursday
... were both snow days. I spent them catching up on things that needed to be taken care of in my personal life and working some more on my lessons. I had to reschedule both of my observations and will be observed by my assistant principal tomorrow and my supervisor on Monday. Tomorrow we have an hour delay, so I'll be interested to see how exactly they work the schedule. TGIF!

Friday
Today we had a 1hr. delay, which knocked out our first class (4th grade), so we actually only had 5 classes. The first graders finished up their modigliani paintings and then with the time left did a free drawing of what they thought a landscape was to brainstorm for the next project (seasonal landscape paintings). After that was tissue collages with the SPED pre-K class (only two boys today) - they explored colors and layering and shapes and of course glue everywhere. Next week they will print with found objects on top of the collage (exploring shoape once more - and repetition). Then I taught the two back to back second grade classes, getting observed by our assistant principal during the first class. When the students had finished their abstract portriats, they were asked to brainstorm - coming up with 3 things they already knew about Ancient Egypt and writing it down on their free-draw paper. Once all the students had finished, I started the lesson asking them about what they already knew - then I tied that discussion into a discussion about sarcophagi and the project. I got a great review from my assistant principal on the lesson and I think after teaching it 3 times, I really have a good idea of how to approach the first part of the lesson for the next 3 classes. That is one of my favorite things about elementary school - you get to teach the same lesson several times and find out the best way to do it! Unfortunately that means that the first class or two has to be the testers for the rest of the classes. I'll be teaching the same lessons and taking over all the classes this coming week - since we're now a week behind because of snow. I'll also be developing two new lessons - plaster masks based on the Mexican idea of tona (symbolic animals) for 5th grade (it will be team taught, but started by me) and a monoprinting lesson for 4th graders. I can't believe that I only have 3 weeks left in this placement! And according to local weather we're suppose to get the biggest snow storm of the year this week - we'll see if this pushes my teaching back more?!