Art

Today’s art session began with a lecture with a guest speaker from South Lanarkshire Council looking at teaching the primary art and design curriculum in schools at all levels. We had a look at some examples of primary children’s artwork and some of the different techniques that can be used. For example, oil paintings, line drawings and water colour paintings. This was extremely helpful, as I was never confident in art, and it has given me some good ideas and opened my mind to all the different possibilities and paths art can take you. Looking into how to make art inter-disciplinary by linking the class topic into many different art lessons was interesting and is a good way to keep the children engaged in what they are doing.

Children, as they move up through the primary, begin to feel like they are under some kind of pressure to make their pieces of art ‘perfect’ and become self conscious as their work is getting judged by their peers looking over (McAuliffe, 2007). In this circumstance, as well as a time saver, giving the children a pen as their only option to draw is very beneficial. It not only gives the children more confidence as they do not get the opportunity to rub out and be perfectionists, it also saves time as a child with a rubber will spend all day rubbing and get now where with the drawing.

The input that followed this was interesting as we were looking into many different techniques to use. We started off with a line drawing of a washing line. The idea of this was to draw the whole picture without lifting up the pen from the paper. This posed as quite a challenge but nonetheless I was intrigued as to whether or not I could do this. Although it was difficult (and the pen may have been lifted a few times), it was a fun and different way of drawing.

For children, this would be a great challenge and one they would dive straight into. It again, steers away from the drawing being ‘perfect’, as sometimes to get to the next part you need to draw back over lines which can make it a bit messy.

‘Inspired by a range of stimuli, I can express and communicate my ideas, thoughts and feelings through activities within art and design.

EXA 0-05a / EXA 1-05a / EXA 2-05a’

(LTS, 2009)

This is an example of an experience and outcome within CfE which would relate to this lesson, however towards the upper primary rather than the lower primary.

Drama

In this Drama session we looked at the different drama conventions that we can apply in lessons to enhance the learners experience.

Previous to this module, my knowledge of drama was very minimal as I never took the subject past second year of High School. As I was a quiet person in school, drama was never my thing and I worried about teaching it to children. However, going over all of these conventions in the previous session and in this one has really began to put my mind at ease.

We discussed each of the conventions above and were given an example of what we could do for each and gave us the opportunity to try them out with each other. This was extremely helpful as sometimes it is difficult to imagine what you have to do without doing it and gives us a student teachers an idea of what we will be asking of the children.

The thought tunnel I felt was particularly effective as it had us talking about what we were feeling as certain characters and is a good way to link drama to other issues.

References