Within our art workshop, we revisited our painting from last week. However today’s session added a little more creativity to it. Our task was to look at our image we had created and to free write over the top of it using Scottish poetry. For my picture, I used the poem called “My Heart in the Highlands”. This poem explains all the things the poet loved about the highlands and how each part of the Highlands meant something to them. Here is my picture:

We used different resources within the image to create a different texture from the paint. Therefore we used resources such as chalk and pencils to create another texture on the picture. This activity allows pupils to use creative writing as well as using art to create a piece of work. Therefore the pupil is developing more than just imagination and they are linking with other curricular areas such as Literacy (Watts et al, 2007).

Within Drama today, we took part in the  micro-teaching activities. This was to allow us to come up with a presentation we could used within the classroom for our pupils and introduce drama conventions we could use. Our group created a presentation on the children’s Book “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt”. This was beneficial as it was a book that everyone would be sure of and it had a lot of opportunities for our peers to create various scenes using the new drama conventions we had just created.

My peers used conventions such as :

• Mime: To show how the characters would look as they walk through the mud.
• Monologue: To describe how the characters felt when they saw the Bear in the cave.
• Voices in Head: To show the difference in feelings between the family and the bear.

At the end of our session, our peers gave us some great feedback. They highlighted that we used a great book that all pupils would enjoy working with and would allow them to develop their own imagination skills by creating different approaches to the book. I felt as an individual this session allowed me to gain great communication skills as I was able to work well with others to create our presentation and present it to my peers (Ahamadi and Besancon, 2017).

Overall, I learned from today’ sessions that both drama and art are important subjects within the curriculum and should be valued as beneficial as the rest of the subjects. Both subjects allow pupils to gain a number of skills outwith the ones they are being taught in class such as communication, critical thinking and collaboration.

REFERENCES

Ahmadi, N and Besancon, M. (2017) Creativity as a Stepping Stone Towards Developing Other Competencies in Classrooms. Journal of Education Research International. [Online] Vol 2017, pg. 1-7. Available: http://downloads.hindawi.co/journals/edri/2017/135746.pdf [Accessed: 1st October 2019].

Watts, R. Cox, S. McAuliffe, D and Heme, S. (2007) Teaching Art and Design 3-11. (Reaching the Standards). London: Continuum International Publishing.