This week’s focus in Integrated Arts was creativity and reflectivity. We looked closely in the lecture at the works of Csikszentmihalyi on creativity and flow and discussed how creativity was once looked upon. Creativity and being unique used to be seen as showing off (Humes, 2005), now it is hoped that being creative and having your own way of things is encouraged in school. Curriculum for Excellence aims to encourage children to find their own ways of completing tasks and learning in a creative way. The experiences and outcomes for the expressive arts aim to notice, cherish and develop creativity in the pupils (Education Scotland, 2010).

We looked further at building a tolerance for ambiguity in the art workshop today by looking at an image in pairs and using Taylor’s Model of Assessment to analyse the image.

The majority of the  images were metaphors and had a deeper meaning. We chose a question from each heading (process, form, content and mood)  and answered them in the video to have a deeper understanding of the metaphor shown to us.

This task could be done with children using similar images in the future to deeply discuss and interrogate art work. This would build upon the pupils’ analysis and evaluation skills. The task of filming and narrating the image could also be used as an art and I.T. project. It is clear to see the learning from this task and it encourages to think about the image in depth and study it further as well as seeing the deeper meaning and understanding it.

In our music workshop today, we looked at the online resource of Charanga. This is an online database of music resources that cover all things music in school – from lesson plans and instrument workbooks to materials of full productions of school shows. We looked at how we could use this as part of our weekly music lessons and tried the tasks ourselves. This resource is full of wonderful materials that could be used in a class and I hope I will have access to this site when I graduate. As a teacher, it is clear to see the benefits Charanga can bring to my class along with how it can help me teach music. Music is not a subject area I feel confident with and this will be a great help to ensure my class do not miss out of music lessons. This is a  challenge faced by teachers when teaching the arts. If a teacher does not feel confident in their own expressive arts skills, they may not feel comfortable teaching the arts to their class and shy away from the curricular area (Clement, 1994).

A section on Charanga shows how to play instruments and can help teach the children how to play phantom instruments before handing them the real instrument. We tried this today with playing along to Mamma Mia on the ‘recorder’, we played the notes of A an G and mimicked the fingers we would use.

Hopefully I will use Charanga whilst on placement this year and hope to use it in coming years. Along with this resource, I hope to complete the image analysis task with my class as I feel it gave me more knowledge on the image and could benefit a class when looking into the meaning behind art.

Clement, R. (1994) The Readiness of Primary Schools to Teach the National Curriculum in Art and Design. [Online] Available: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1476-8070.1994.tb00353.x [Accessed: 29 October 2019].

Education Scotland (2010) Curriculum for Excellence: Expressive Arts Experiences and Outcomes. [Online] Available: https://education.gov.scot/Documents/expressive-arts-eo.pdf  [Accessed: 29 October 2019].

Humes, W. (2005) Barriers to creativity in the classroom. Times Educational Supplement. [Online] 29 October, non-paginated. Available: https://www.tes.com/news/barriers-creativity-classroom [Accessed: 29 October 2019].