Week Four- October 1st 2019

This week we focused on bringing the arts ‘to life’. This was done through personifying our art work, and creating dramas around different books.

In art we continued with our artwork from last week and brought our work to life by adding thoughts, feelings, poetry and lyrics to it, allowing it to stand out and be personified. I focused on adding song lyrics and Scottish poetry as I found it easier to relate back to my work. When doing this I found lyrics and poems to do with each part of my artwork and wrote it around that area, for example, I wrote lyrics from the song Loch Lomond around the water section of my painting. This links to the expressive arts ‘experiences and outcomes’ as it states “Inspired by a range of stimuli, I can express and communicate my ideas, thoughts and feelings through activities within art and design” (Education Scotland, n.d, p4). This was done through using imagination, interpretation and literacy skills to display words, thoughts, and associated ideas within the painting, bringing it to life.

I found this task to be more challenging than last weeks as it involved being creative with words, thoughts and feelings and relating them back to what we saw within the artwork. I did not fully understand the purpose of this lesson and found it to be difficult to think on the spot, however, I found that by referring to poetry and song lyrics that I found online, this was made easier instead of using my own thoughts.

After we had completed our artwork, every picture from both sections were displayed around the room. This reinforced to me how crucial it is to display children’s work as it allows them a feeling of self achievement and development. This is something that I aim to promote when doing art and visual work as it promotes the child’s learning.

In drama we focused on micro teaching this week. Each group was given the task to create a drama lesson and implement it to the class. My group focused on bringing the book ‘We’re going on a bear hunt’ to life. We based our lesson on early/first level pupils and found learning intentions and success criteria to support the lesson. Within our lesson we focused on 3 drama conventions- flashback, freeze frame and monologue, and used these to get everyone to act out different parts of the book. If I was to do this activity within a primary school, I would read the book with the whole class so everyone was familiar with the story. I think that doing a follow up lesson, possibly focusing on art, could be effective. This could be done by using different materials to create the settings within the book, for example, using charcoal to enhance the darkness of the cave.

DramaPresentation

I found this task to be challenging as the lesson was aimed at young people whereas our audience were people our own age and therefore I felt awkward at times as we did not want to be patronising with what we were saying. However, I think that the book we focused on would be an appropriate story to look at with young people as there can be a lot of interactive tasks and activities you could do before and after the lesson. Graigner (2003) suggested the idea that learning through stories can enhance our ability to develop ideas, make links and connections to our feelings, as well as using our creative abilities. This backs up the idea that by focusing the lesson on a well known storybook, children may respond well to it as they can be more creative and use their understanding of the story to reflect on their thoughts and feelings. This task highlighted me how different it is to stand up and teach a lesson on drama than it is to sit and participate and reaffirmed to me how much more I enjoyed teaching the lesson over participating. Although it was challenging doing a task aimed at children with adults, I felt a lot more confident presenting a lesson than I do when participating.

The planning of this lesson gave me a taster into what it could be like organising lessons. It involved collaboration and communication skills to be put to use due to working with a group of 5 other people to implement the lesson. It allowed me to become more familiar with benchmarks, experiences and outcomes, as well as creating our own learning intentions and success criteria. One thing I would do differently if I were to do this again would be to include some form of assessment, possibly 2 stars and a wish or writing any questions or queries on post it notes, to allow feedback and offer individuals self evaluation.

Overall, I got a lot out of this drama class as it allowed me to work within a group and create a lesson that we then had to implement in front of an audience. I found this to be a beneficial task to do as it gave me the experience of working within a group to collaboratively decide on what we wanted to focus our lesson on, decide what drama conventions we felt were appropriate to use and when, and actually present the lesson. It gave me the experience of planning and implementing a lesson within a group before I start placement, so I now feel more confident in creating and teaching a drama lesson. Personally, once I had done some research into songs and poetry I could use to describe my artwork the task became much easier. However, the resources of iPads and computers may not be as readily available if doing this with a class and I think that this would have to be taken into consideration if doing a similar activity. If I were to do this same art lesson with a class I would print off different Scottish poems and song lyrics that pupils could either use or get inspiration from as I think that this would help get started with the task as teachers have the role of “providing resources, images, helpful tips and encouragement” (Penny et al, 2002).

References-

Education Scotland. (n.d.) Curriculum for Excellence: Expressive Arts Experiences and Outcomes. [Online] Available: https://education.gov.scot/Documents/expressive-arts-eo.pdf [Accessed: 15 October 2019].