For this week in integrated arts our workshops were in music and art. I thoroughly enjoyed today’s workshops and I can draw clear teaching points and example lessons from both.
In music with Julie, we used a planned lesson for early/first level along with a second level lesson to explore using drumsticks and beaters in the classroom for music. We played along to different rhythms within pieces of music embedded in the power-point. This was an extremely enjoyable yet fairly challenging task. I could clearly see how this could be a number of weeks worth of music lessons or even a whole term. There was a lot of background learning to build up to using musical notes like quavers and crochets. The first step of this we used with circles and squares as they are shapes all children should recognise and know the syllables in each word, each syllable required a tap of the drumsticks or beaters. This use of literacy helped me to understand the process and as a future teacher I can see how simplifying the musical notes to an object seen regularly and known well can help increase understanding within the class when introducing music in this way. I would use these lessons in my class as I am a beginner with music and this was a great introduction that was easy to follow and understand. It was clear to see the next steps and progression through the slides.
In art, we also looked at how literacy can be linked in with expressive arts and other subject areas. We studied the style of Bob and Roberta Smith and created our own prints inspired by him.
This integration of art and literacy helps to enhance the learning and knowledge of both subjects (Marshall, 2014). This would be a useful lesson when not only teaching about current artists but also when teaching the art of printing and how things were done before the massive technological shift. This was an insightful lesson as I was impressed by the work done in the group before me and had no idea how these pieces were created. It was easy to see how a simpler task could be done using the same resources with younger levels in the school by simplifying the brief or completing the steps with the children rather than the class working independently like we did today.
Overall, both workshops today were very hands on and showed us how these lessons could be used in the future with our own classes. The music workshop taught me the basis of music reading which is a valuable skill I did not have before and I learned of printing methods I did not know of.
Marshall, J. (2014) Transdisciplinarity and Art Integration: Toward a NewUnderstanding of Art-Based Learning across the Curriculum, Studies in Art Education. London: Routledge. [Online] Available at: https://moodle.uws.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/36842/mod_resource/content/1/Transdisciplinarity%20And%20Art%20Integration%20highlighted.pdf [Accessed: 15 October 2019].
