This week we had 4 Norwegian students visiting our university, so within our arts workshop our work was inspired by Norway’s landscapes. After the lecture given to us this morning by the Norwegian students it was clear that a lot of their learning is done outdoors. So today we took part in outdoor learning where we channelled landscape artists such as Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy who both create thought provoking work to inspired us to create a piece of our own.
My group took inspiration from Andy Goldsworthy’s work as he used lots of spiral shapes and gradients to make an impact with his art. We used his use of spirals and gradient to create a circular clock which can be seen below.
This piece was based on climate change. We felt that by using a spiral shape to make our clock it would represent our planet while the clock hands represented the idea that time is running out to save it. We decided to use the gradient of different leave colours to represent the lifecycle of a leave which symbolise the death of the planet as just like a leave it stared out healthy and green it will eventually become dead and brown the same way our planet will be if we don’t make changes soon. We decided based our image on this topic because it is such a relevant topic that is all over the news today and is something that is on our minds due to our sustainable development module. This coupled with the fact that we were using natural resources to make this picture made us think that it would be impactful and really get our message across. After taking part in this activity I feel that I have much better appreciation for natural resources and how these can be incorporated with outdoor learning to successfully teach an art lesson. This lesson also highlighted the ways in which art can be used to express ourselves and our opinion on different topics much better than words often can which is one of the 10 lessons that the arts teach (Eisner,2002). I would use this lesson with a class because not only does it require no resource but those found outside, I think there are many opportunities to make this a cross curricular lesson. As a lack of resources is one of the biggest challenges when teaching the arts this would alleviate this problem (Edwards, 2013). If I was doing this lesson with a class, I would maybe give them a problem to focus on, as by giving the children complete freedom some many find it difficult to choose or even think of a problem to focus on. However, if I only provided them with a problem then it would allow them to still be creative and all come up with different images. This is one of the reasons that I feel children would really engage with this lesson, as it allows them to be autonomous as well as learning in an outdoor environment which is clearly important as within the CFE outdoor learning document implies outdoor environments and surroundings act as a rich stimulus for creative thinking and learning. This affords opportunities for challenge, enquiry, critical thinking and reflection (Scottish Government, n.d.). It is clear that “Outdoor learning offers many opportunities for learners to deepen and contextualise their understanding within curriculum area” (Scottish Government, p.9).
Within our music session today we began looking at different software that can be used to allow children to compose different music pieces. Garage Band is a software that is very versatile and allows you to add your own voice, instrumental pieces and upload different sound affects to create different pieces of music. Our session today was all about us getting used to using this software and learning about the different ways that it can be used. To do this we created out own piece that was to sound like a autumn walk I used different piano pieces and layered it with sound effects.
After using this software, I think that it is easy to use once you get the hang of it and that there would be many different ways to use this within the classroom not only just in a music lesson. This would be great follow on from last week’s lesson using beats and rhythms. It would allow them to compose and play with their own pieces of music using different beats, pitches and rhythms which is one of the CFE Learning outcomes (Scottish Government, 2017). One of the most interesting ways to use garage band is for bringing a story to life. Personally, I feel that this is a great way to bring both literacy and music into one lesson. This would be a great way to depend children’s understanding of a book while also teaching music. This software would allow children to make a book interactive and add sound effects while you could have the teacher voice reading the story. Using this for a book such as are going on a bear hunt would be effective and engage children in the story. Garage band is different a resource that I would use with a class as I would allow children to express themselves and really become interactive in a lesson.
References
Edwards, J. (2013) Teaching Primary Art. [Online] Available:https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Bb63AwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=teaching+art+in+primary+schools&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjbn8mhrp7mAhUHQ8AKHTicDIcQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=teaching%20art%20in%20primary%20schools&f=false [Accessed: 22 October 2019].
Scottish Government (2017). Benchmarks Expressive Arts. [Online] Available:https://education.gov.scot/improvement/Documents/ExpressiveArtsBenchmarksPDF.pdf [Accessed: 22 October 2019].
Scottish Government (n.d) [Online] curriculum for excellence
through outdoor learning. Available: https://education.gov.scot/Documents/cfe-through-outdoor-learning.pdf [Accessed: 22 October 2019].
