Visual Arts

In this week’s visual arts workshop, we focused on the arts practice we had seen during placement. Teaching arts in schools is important as “​The inspiration and power of the arts play a vital role in enabling our children and young people to enhance their creative talent and develop their artistic skills.” (Education Scotland, nd). In my placement, I had observed very few art lessons being taught. Although some of the students had observed some good arts practices whilst in their placement, it is clear that arts is not given the same amount of importance as literacy and numeracy.  It is the responsibility of the teacher to ensure that they are providing children with the experiences to become creative and this can be done by enabling them to take part in arts.  Creativity is “a process which generates ideas that have value to the individual. It involves looking at familiar things with a fresh eye, examining problems with an open mind, making connections, learning from mistakes and using imagination to explore new possibilities” (Scottish government, 2013, p3).

We also spoke about teachers having high tolerance for mess and noise as children often tend to get messy and noisy when they taking part in arts.

Music

In the music workshop, we looked at rhythm and beat. We used the drumsticks to tap the beat of the music. I found this activity very challenging  as we through the different levels,

References:

Scottish Government (2013) Creativity Across Learning https://education.gov.scot/improvement/Documents/Creativity/CRE1_WhatAreCreativitySkills/Creativity3to18.pdf [ Accessed 10/12/2017]

Education Scotland (nd) https://education.gov.scot/scottish-education-system/policy-for-scottish-education/policy-drivers/cfe-(building-from-the-statement-appendix-incl-btc1-5)/curriculum-areas/Expressive%20arts [ Accessed: 11/12/2017)