This week in the Visual Arts seminar we got the the chance to make our own paintbrushes with a range of different materials. I found this activity to be very beneficial and it is something I feel like I would make use of in my own class due to the creative nature of the lesson. I feel that it allowed us to show and develop our imaginative ideas and it also was able to make everyone show their individuality as no two brushes were the same. After we had completed the making of our brushes we were described a mountain scene by the lecturer and then by memory we had to recreate this by using our paintbrushes, the three primary colours and a white paint. I at first found this quite a difficult feat due to the uncertainty and trying to make my picture perfect. However after letting my imagination take over and trying not to overthink everything I found this to be a very valuble lesson which opened my eyes about the way we teach the Arts in schools. Here I have attached some pictures of the processes that we went through during this seminar.
For our music seminar we were looking at figurenotes which is a system to identify musical notes making use of shapes and colours. For example the note C would be identified by a red circle. I found this system to be quite a good method of teaching younger children how to read musical notation in a very simple and easy to understand way. We tested out this system in class by trying to play simple songs on a glockenspiel such as Twinkle Twinkle, Jingle Bells and Frere Jacques. Due to having quite a musical background I found this activity to be really fun and using the figurenotes system made it even easier as each note had a clear and distinct colour and shape. Also during this seminar we had the chance to show off some of our musical skills by making our own 16 bar melody to the backing track of the song Hit the road Jack. I really enjoyed this seminar as it took me back to being in primary school and having fun while learning music.