Music

 

This week we completed the music session in the mac labs as we used the online resource Charanga. It’s a living cloud-based resource that brings together great music, modern pedagogy and the latest educational technology. It supports all aspects of music in school including the new music curriculum, as well as providing children and their families with opportunities to continue learning and exploring music at home through Music World. (Charanga, 2017).

Charanga is an extremely useful resource as it has many different lesson plans with activities for all stages of learning that aids in the development of music knowledge and skills. It is a practical resource therefore is engaging for the children. I would use this resource in class as it allows the pupils to choose from a variety of different genres ensuring they find something that interests them. It also can be made to suit the learning stage of the pupils, allowing everyone to be challenged within the lesson.

I really like this programme as I don’t feel as confident teaching music as I do with other subjects in the curriculum therefore, this allows me to gain lesson ideas that are fun and suitable for all ages in the primary.

 

Art

The arts teach children to make good judgements about qualitive relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail. (Eisner, 2002)

During our art session, we looked at the painting “Windows in the West” by the Glaswegian artist Avril Paton. Her painting shows the lives of all the individuals within a tenement in Glasgow that her flat looks onto.

 

Within the session, we looked at the painting and became inspired to make our own ‘window’. We were giving polystyrene and marked into the material to create our own design of a window, and then, dipped it into paint that we had rolled, and printed it onto paper of a colour of our choice.

  

We repeated this process twice more using different colours of paint and paper and each time, added more design to the polystyrene allowing for more detail on the paper.

 

I really enjoyed this session and feel it would be extremely beneficial in the classroom as it allows for the children to create their own unique picture and is relatively easy to manage and for the children to understand. This task could be completed at all ages and will give the children a sense of pride in taking ownership in their own work.

References

Charanga. (2017) Musical school – whole school primary music teaching resources. [Online] Available: http://charanga.com/site/musical-school/ [Accessed: 8 January 2017]

Eisner, E. W. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind. London: Yale University Press.