Art

“In order to make art more relevant, exciting and meaningful to students in school we need to draw upon the incredible resources at our disposal and the intellectual dynamism, creativity and imagination of our time” (Edited, 2004).

Today’s workshop, I feel, had a theme of ‘making the ordinary extraordinary.’ This is because we did a very simple task with simple objects and, with the assistance of our imaginations, created something else from it. We all got given a piece of A3 white paper and black ink and were told to press an area of our hand into the ink before printing the paper. This printed shape was then going to become something different through our imagination. I decided that I could see a giraffe, a candle, a snow man and a flower from the prints, so I drew details in. We then moved to someone else’s prints and compared to see if we saw differences in the shapes. If we did, we drew in what we saw. This showed that everyone’s mind works differently and this showed be expressed. “Of central importance is valuing the students’ personal responses to looking at and making art” (Edited, 2004).

As these shapes are organic forms, we then took geometric shapes such as Lego and made prints with these. This created a new stimulus for creativity and we were able to find different pictures within the shapes. Within the various textures and patterns, I saw a caterpillar, a brick wall, a house and a spine. We then repeated the same activity in rotating to view and evaluate someone else’s ideas.

I found this workshop very inspiring because I feel that self-expression and the arts play a big part in the learning process and I feel that this activity subtly conveys children’s ideas without putting pressure on them to reflect on their thoughts. Children are typically taught in school to produce work that the teacher is expecting from them through the traditional methods of learning with worksheets, books and copying (Eisner, 2001). I personally feel that with an constantly developing world with developing resources, we need to reflect this in the classroom adapting our resources and exploring all possibilities. This is possible, I feel, through integrated arts and activities like I explored today.

Dance

“Dance instruction does require teachers who are dedicated to delivering quality physical education and dance programs and view dance as essential to a student’s education”(Cone and Cone, 2012).

In our first session of dance, we explored different activities to do with movement. We took part in several games and warm-ups to reflect how dance not only has health benefits but enables the children to work together and build confidence. One of the activities involved everyone adding their own short movement to the music one after the other for the class to copy. Afterwards, we explored the body more by working in groups, drawing around one person and then labelling the outline with the named muscles, organs and bones. This was done with the aid of a list of the organ, muscle and bone names. Once completed, we self-checked with the iPad provided. This activity is important in the classroom as it highlights to the pupils which parts of the body they are moving and working.

Today’s session was fun and engaging and definitely showed me that you could have no dance background at all to be able to integrate dance into the classroom. “Children’s dance is a way of knowing that fully integrates all aspects of being human. Kinesthetically, intellectually, socially and emotionally, children learn about themselves and others through the medium of dance”(Cone and Cone, 2012).

Cone, T.P. and Cone, S.L. (2012) Teaching children dance. 3rd edn. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.

Edited, R.H. (2004) Art Education 11-18: Meaning, purpose and direction. Edited by Richard Hickman. London: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Eisner, E.W. (2001) The educational imagination: On the design and evaluation of schooll programs. 3rd edn. United States: Merrill Prentice Hall.