VISUAL ARTS
The visual arts section focused on the painting; Windows in the West (1993) by Avril Paton. This painting was created using watercolours and paper. Paton (2017) took inspiration from a personal memory that she had of snow and the feeling it gave her. This painting is owned by City of Glasgow Galleries which makes it relevant to my environment. Living in the central belt of Scotland, not too far from Glasgow, it is very common to see tenement housing.
After a discussion we spoke about how we can create stories from prints and use prints as visual stimulus during literacy or drama lessons. While creating these prints I thought of how children could create stories from the prints they had made.
We used Patons’ (1993) work to create prints of our own. By focusing on a particular area of the painting we had the opportunity to explore the vast amount of detail in the painting. We used dynamic colours to create our prints. We discussed colour theory and the affect that colours can have on our eyes.
DRAMA
The second workshop focused on drama. Personally I didn’t enjoyed drama as a child and was always quite reluctant of participating within various drama projects. My confidence has never been anywhere near as strong as I would’ve liked, which made me slightly apprehensive about this workshop. However, our lecturer made it very clear that we weren’t here to be uncomfortable but for our skills in drama to develop over time; in matter of fact that drama wasn’t what I once thought it was, ACTING!
In this workshop we discovered ways to teach this topic in the classroom. We were introduced to five key activities that you can use in the classroom to teach drama. These were Teacher in Role, Improvisation, Thought Tunnel, Freeze Frame and Hot Seating. To help us understand these concepts the lecturer used a story about a dragon causing trouble in a village. In this case the pupils would be the villagers and the teacher could play the Mayor (or some other form of superiority) . It was suggested that the teacher always plays some form of leader so that they are still seen as the person in charge. In the story the Mayor (teacher) asked the Villagers (students) if they had any ideas to stop the dragon. In our class we gave a range of different ideas and one was to fight the dragon. Using this idea we were able to incorporate a freeze frame. This was where we were put into groups and created a freeze frame based on how we would fight the dragon. I found the freeze frame a fun and easy activity that would work well in classrooms when working on literacy or topics. All of these activities are fun and interesting which i believe will encourage children to take part in drama as it does not fall under the bracket of acting, which I once thought of.
Drama is a way for children to express themselves and see other peoples points of view. I understand that drama can be used in various areas of the curriculum such as literacy and history.
After participating in a few drama activities such as; a freeze frame. I realised that drama was not as scary and embarrassing as I had built it up to be in my head. There are many aspects of drama that I did not know was part of it, I thought drama was just about being up on stage presenting yourself as someone else.
As future teachers we need to develop the character we want to portray in our school lives and I feel that the integrated arts module will help me with this.
My skills have developed through the integrated arts workshops so far by confidence in the subject growing. My understanding of the subjects have deepened and I am now therefore more knowledgeable about the subjects and feel slightly more confident for when the time comes where I will teach these subjects. It’s important in all aspects of the curriculum that they all link and relate to each other.
References
Paton, A. (1993) Windows in the West. [Watercolours on paper 48” x 60”] Glasgow. [Online] Available: https://avrilpaton.co.uk/prints/windows-in-the-west [Accessed: 3 October 2017]
Paton, A. (2017) Windows in the West. [Online] Available: https://avrilpaton.co.uk/prints/windows-in-the-west [Accessed: 3 October 2017]
