Reflection #10

What?

This week I started my first field experience at Vista Elementary. I am working with a fourth grade class and I love it. So far during field, the only form of art I have seen is the books they are writing and getting published. They have to draw pictures to go with their stories. This is all I have seen from my cooperating teacher.

So What?

So what does this mean, this means a lot. My partner and I have already had the opportunity of teaching a few lessons. We are teaching the water cycle and so we have incorporated process drama into the lesson. We assigned the students in groups and they were to act out the water cycle. Each student was assigned a different part but they were to come up and use their creativity on how they were going to present the water cycle. One group did really well at combining everything whereas other groups left a process out. Each presentation however showed creativity and showed art.

Now What?

For me this means we should use more art in the classroom. I noticed during this weeks field that the students really enjoy it. It is also a great way to assess the students and really see if they understood what was being taught during the unit. For my future classroom I plan to incorporate it more into my lessons. I think it is fun and very student friendly. I also noticed while planning our lessons that using art is very simple and we got ideas to use it in more than one way. We also used a song that could help our students understand the cycle better. The students really liked the song and caught on quickly because the music and lyric were catchy and easy to remember. It used a lot of repetition and vocab that they were working with during the unit.