Field Experience

I really enjoyed field experience these past few weeks. It was really rewarding to work first hand with the students and see how great it is to be a teacher. Our lessons which implemented creative arts were one where we had the students use movements in dance to portray what they thought of vocabulary words in our Mountain Man unit. The other lesson used process drama while conducting a readers theater having to do with Mountain Men. The students seemed to enjoy both lessons and it was great to see them learn and grow while using creative arts with the unit. I am excited to be a teacher in the near future and be able to use more creative arts while teaching my students. I have seen first hand that by implementing creative arts, our students will be able to retain more information while learning, because it has been taught in a creative way and they remember more while learning.

Teaching With and Through Visual Art

I particularly enjoyed the specific elements and principles we learned and focused on in visual arts. It was fun to have the hands on experience really understanding all of the various elements involed with visual arts. Although I have had some art intructional background, it is still refreshing to be reminded of these particular elements and principles. It was also very important to keep these in our journals so that we can refer to them and have specific examples of each when we are teaching the arts in the field. I think its important that our students understand these principles and how they are important when they are creating visual art. It helps them understand visual art and respect it when observing the art of others as well as their own.
I also enjoyed the day when we presented information about the artists of childrens books and provided materials for our classmates to participate in various art elements and principles. It was exciting to realize the different elements and styles that each artist used and how this diversity in art is pleasing to the viewers as well as educational.