Week #7: Back to school, back to school ...

Monday
Today was intense and felt very discombobulated. After only teaching one day last week - a week ago, I feel like my lessons are becoming very disjointed and I'm loosing my momentum. With only 8 days left in this placement, all the lessons that I have planned and started teaching will not be finished before I leave - while the days off have been nice, the situation the weather has presented is not optimal. My teacher will now actually have to finish most of my lessons, at least the ones that I started two weeks ago - craziness.
I think the lessons today went well enough, all of the Monday classes are on day two of my new lessons, except for 4th grade who is just starting a new project. Unfortunately, because we were out for so long, I was somewhat disconnected from my lessons and did not feel as prepared as I had preffered. Also, the students were celebrating Valentines Day today - so they were a little hopped up on sugar and massively chatty/unfocused on school. Special.
I will be making several changes to my lessons, in their seond part - especially the kindergarten lesson. I really struggle to work with the lower elementary grade levels. I have a hard time slowing down and at the same time going fast enough to keep their short attention spans.

Tuesday
The classes of Tuesday are so special ... especially my 2nd graders. I was amazingly frustrated after leaving school today as I felt I had a hard time keeping my students focused and myself organized. I made the adjustments to my lessons that my teacher and I discussed yesterday - which helped a lot. For my kindergarten Matisse paper cutting lesson, each student only got one color (a half sheet at that) to create the shapes so that they would use all of the paper on their projects (just like Matisse did). Unfortunately, something that I can't seem to master is getting them to use less glue! In my first grade class, I had them redo their trees using the letter V and then monitored their progress during the copying portion more closely. I feel that I really struggle to teach one student in my first grade class, he has special needs, but since my school encourages inclusion - they don't tell us which students are special needs, and instead we get to figure out ourselves. I try to help him and give him a little extra attention - but its such conflict to help one student or the whole class - I really struggle with it. With my 3rd grade class, I tried a different approach to explaining the letter forms they were to explore for their illuminated letters. Instead of explaining the letters forms with positive and negative space, I demonstrated how to form the outline of a letter so there would be space to add their illuminations inside their letter and outside - the newspaper collage backgrounds look great though!
The pre-K lesson today went really well though - a little wild and messy (we definitely should have put them in smocks), but the end product looked fantastic. We discussed circles and what objects were circles and then did found object prints with just black and white paint on their tissue paper collages.
I can't believe that I only have seven days left in my elementary placement - I keep wondering if I could have done something differently with my lesson plans to make them more easily modified for school cancellations - such is life. Of course now I start coming up with all these lessons for elementary that I could have explored too ...

Wednesday
Today was much better than yesterday! I came in and was able to prepare all of the needed materials for the day during our morning planning and experiment more with my mono-printing sample, it finally works! Our Weds. (and Thurs.) classes are about 2 weeks behind our other classes due to snow days - so I had to unfortunately try to speed up my lessons to get them a little further along. Most of the classes were able to work really well/focus and get through the material they needed to ... however, I had very difficult Kindergarten and 2nd grade classes today. In my Kindergarten class there are 3 very autistic students, one can be either just energetic or really disruptive, another talks constantly, and the third is quiet, but needs constan assistance. My teacher even said today that after I leave for my next placement, she is going to have to do some thinking on how to handle the class and the special needs of the students without someone else in the classroom. I really feel like I am improving my classroom management skills drastically though in these challenging situations - my teacher and I actually discussed that today during our second planning (after the Kindergarten class). After my day yesterday, I was feeling very insufficient in controlling the class - but she said she never felt like I wasn't in control and had handled all of the misbehaviour very well (which is why she hadn't stepped in at all, even yesterday when I almost had to send a student to the office after disrupting the class repeatedly and being asked to stop 3 times).
I've decided I really enjoy the upper level elementary more than the lower, especially 3rd graders - the class I had today followed directions, worked quietly (talking among their tables), and really enjoyed the projects. I also sat with the 5th graders today - moving from table to table, doing the project with them and chatting with them during class (my teacher doing the same). They are much more apt to just hang out and do work - glad to have the opportunity to socialize and be treated somwhat like they are grown-up. Unfortunately because of the snow days, I will not get to take over teaching the 5th graders at all - but my teacher and I are going to team teach the introduction to the Tona mask lesson.

Thursday
There is such a drastic difference from our Weds. schedule to our Thurs. schedule - we had 7 classes today, as opposed to 5 classes! However, I feel the day went very smoothly and I really am starting to feel at home being in charge of the classes - unfortunately next week I have to give them all back and move on to my next placement. I have come to realize that organization, preparation, planning, and the abilitiy to adapt/evolve lessons & plans are the keys to teaching elementary art. This morning when I came in I gathered and laid out all my materials for the day so when I had classes back to back, I wouldn't be scrambling to be prepared. The first class I had was 4th grade and I was actually able to almost completely catch them up to the other 4th grade classes. I think that I'm also improving my instructional skills - I can give directions in such a way so that they are followed better - part of the key is "what you will need to do," instead of "what I want you to do."
Currently I'm struggling with the execution of the lesson that the 4th graders are doing next - I want to do monoprinting of patterns to become the background of their aboriginal (austrialian style) animal art. However, they style of mono printing I want to do usually requires glass/plexiglass - which we don't have so we've been trying to use acetate in the trials/ samples with no luck so far. Its a huge challenge that the art teacher faces when trying to adapt lesson ideas to available materials, but I plan to keep working on it so I can do the printing lesson with the students next week before I leave. I'm really bummed that because of the adjusted schledule due to snow that I won't see my own lessons finish or see the ones my teacher is going to start after mine - they sound so cool! However, since my next placement is literally just down the street I'll definitely have to check back in with my teacher!