Throughout this week we participated in both an Art input and drama input which we were able to draw upon our skills from last week.

This week’s drama input focused on more drama conventions and how we as a student, teachers can implement them in the classroom as teachers. As we were focusing on flashback and flashforward, we were also closely looking at improvisation which is a skill in which whilst acting you do not use a script or any sort of aid to structure your acting, you simply just perform. Very quickly I realised just how important it is to incorporate improvisation into the classroom. The Educator magazine states that “the benefit of learning improvisation have been proven in both young people and adults to improve and promote: communication, decision, making, working as a team, social interaction, confidence, active learning, physical awareness and helping with anxiety” (The Educator Magazine, 2017).This statement from the Educator allowed me to see and understand how important it truly is for children to have the chance to use improvisation as it is a great way for children to express themselves in the classroom without being directed at all and allowing them to be as creative as they inspire to be. Improvisation is also a wonderful way that us as new teachers can get to know our new students, but it also allows us to see the ways they learn but also gives us an insight into how they do not like to learn. Throughout this experience I got to express myself in a way that I thought I would not be able to do throughout my university experience, although I may have felt slightly uncomfortable, I now have an understanding of how some children in my class may feel.

I also got a similar feeling throughout this week’s art lesson. This week’s tasks included taking a text and drawing all over it, however we wanted no matter if it linked to the text or not, we were able to be as creative as we felt like or wanted to be. The justify the arts chapters show us just how creative the children can be when it comes to tasks like these, children can understand a text more in depth as through tasks like this they have the opportunity to fully understand the text that is in front of them. This closely linked to our drama input as to me it felt like we were improvising. I also felt like we were able to improvise throughout another task were in which, we popped our hands in ink and the mark we make with our ink we got to create pictures. With the pictures we created there was no guidelines to what we could create we had all the freedom that we desired. This automatically made me think about what we were creating in drama.

Overall this week has shown me how important it is to allow the children to have as much freedom as you can possibility give them. Through this freedom they are able to show what they are learning and what they need help within future lessons. I believe that if and when I allow this to happen in my own classroom, I will be able to inspire my class to be as creative and openminded as possible.

Bibliography

The Educator magazine, 2017. [Online] http://www.the-educator.org/benefits-improvisation-teens/. Accessed 27^th September 2019

Integrated Arts is where we as students learn how to interpret each performing art, that one day in the near future will deliver to our own class. For the forthcoming weeks we are focusing on drama and art.

During this week’s drama class, we started to look at the drama conventions. We were looking at the different drama conventions such as teacher in role and freeze frame. Through these drama conventions it allows us as student teachers to see just how creative the children can be throughout this class. They can take the drama in any direction and truly let it become their own. Booth states that “Drama is the act of crossing into world of story… Storying provides students with a natural human process for finding essential meanings in the experiences of themselves and others” (Booth,1995). This explains that children can help to create their own stories and use all their creativity to make a new world that could not exist without their imaginations. For us as teachers its extremely important that we allow them to have this creative freedom that children need and desire.

In our art class this week, we were also focusing on how important it is for our children in the classroom to have this creative freedom that we discovered they needed during our drama input. For us, this input allowed us to see just how a child’s creativity can be easily directed by the child’s surroundings. As we were looking through the artwork that had been produced by children through different stages in school and developmentally, it was easy to see just exactly when a child is most creative. From this I now have the understanding of when it is best to let the

 children have freedom with their art lessons whilst still giving them direction but allow them to be as free as possible with what they are creating.

Both our drama and art inputs this week, deeply explored the creativity of a child and how we as teachers and influencers can help them to be as creative as possible. From both of these inputs, I also realised just how important it is to allow each child to be creative and let them flourish as they are creating their own paths without having to be directed too much.

References

Booth,D. (1985) Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads: Reading and drama in education, Theory Into Practice. 24(3):193-198

Welcome to blogs.glowscotland.org.uk – Glow Blogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!