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[integratingthearts-blog]

Week 11 in-school experience

Being the last lesson, we wanted to do something with the students that was fun and enjoyable. As we have yet to have experience with music and dance, we decided that we would integrate the two strands. Initially, we wanted to do activities that followed on from the drama and picture book, however with the time that we had with the students, we felt that it would not have been ideal. This is because the activities such as composition would be rushed, making the learning experience not very meaningful. Therefore, introducing quick and fun activities ensured that the students were having fun on their last day. As we felt that our behavioural management skills were much better and we had more control over the class, we decided to do our entire lesson outside after setting explicit expectations and boundaries inside the classroom. The music and dance related activities were: 

1) Send off the star

 Students needed to imagine that they were the little boy from the picture book in the previous drama lesson. The aim of the activity was to send the star off and back into the sky. Standing in a circle, the students needed to send the star off to the person next to them using a clapping hand motion until it reached the final person. Played several times, there were a range of variations, which included: different speed and direction. This activity allowed the students to be engaged and focused as they needed to watch the star closely and send off when it is their turn. 

A modification for next time could be for students to incorporate sounds. Particularly in a space theme, students can make a sound that relates to space or stars when sending off the star to the next person. 


2) Miming

Pairs needed to mirror their partners and copy the exact movements. This was modelled explicitly prior to the students trying it out themselves. The modelling enabled students to understand the importance of using different levels and body movements. Focusing on each other built cohesion and focus between the pairs. It is confirmed that this activity permits students to explore their own body movements, which makes them feel more comfortable when engaging in more dance related activities (Gibson and Ewing, 2011). As such, this served as a good transition to the next activity as it assisted in creating a safe space for students to experiment and explore. 


3) Follow the space leader

To ensure that students understand the activity and the expectations, explicit modelling ensured that students would not muck around in the groups. This reflected in the activity as the students were behaving and were thoroughly engaged with the dance movements. They incorporated a variety of different levels and dynamics, which demonstrated their understanding of the elements of dance. As such, it required students to copy their leader’s dance movements and when the teacher yelled “swap,” the leader would move to the back of the line and a new leader is in place. The dance movements incorporated the space theme and linked to the previous drama role-walk as it required students to represent space objects through different movements. Incorporating this activity enabled students to express their inner thoughts in relation to space. Hence, Gibson and Ewing (2011) suggest that when students are moving creatively, they are engaged in problem solving and creativity.

Throughout the outside lesson, we did not need to remind the students to keep their voices low and stayed within the boundaries that we set. We felt that the students progressed and our management skills improved. In hindsight, establishing the expectations and boundaries ensured that we established a positive, creative dance context for the students. Gibson and Ewing (2011, p. 39) reiterate by stating that facilitating positive dance climates arise when teachers discuss signals, organisations and expectations, “including the need to share the space amicably.”

When students were asked to reflect upon the past four weeks about their favourite lesson or activity, many students said ‘Follow the Leader’ and the freeze frames. Students elaborated on this and suggested that they were enjoyable and engaging activities, making them want to go back and redo the activity. This confirmed that the Arts has the potential to provide students with learning experiences that are engaging, motivating and fun. Moreover, it allows students to tap into their human experience, emotions and thoughts whilst building upon a deeper understanding of concepts from other key learning areas.

[integratingthearts-blog]

Week 10 in-school experience

Inviting students to explore quality literature through drama allows for a deeper understanding of the book whilst promoting them to imagine new possibilities. As such, the focus of this in-school experience was for students to represent their predictions through a freeze frame about the strategy the character would take to catch a star in How to catch a star by Oliver Jeffers.   

Prior to the activity, the students were asked to role-walk an array of objects and people that related to space: astronaut, sun, rocket, star, alien and planet. Explicit modelling and W.I.L.F. criterias were provided to ensure that the students understood what was needed and to minimise misbehaviours that were apparent in the previous lesson. This proved effective as the students had a clear understanding of our expectations, listened to our instructions and the noise-level decreased significantly. Therefore, the students were actively participating and engaging in the role-walk and utilised a variety of levels and body gestures to portray the character. These characters could easily be individualised, which was evident throughout the activity as there were a diverse range of enactments. The role-walk was integrated into the classroom as a warm-up activity, which proved to be effective as Ewing and Simons (2004, p. 23) suggest that “observing and exploring the meanings generated by bodies moving in space can ease children into other modes of drama.” Creating meaning and exploring their imagination through movements developed their concentration, observation and confidence. 

In order to ease the students into the freeze frame and provide them with some context, we read the first few pages of the picture book and stopped just before the page that told the audience the strategies the boy used to catch the star. Hence, the students were able to use their imagination, creativity, own-experiences and an understanding of the book to create a freeze frame in groups. Further explicit modelling of our own freeze frame with a few students’ help and a W.I.L.F. criteria effectively honed in their understanding and provided them with a clear goal. This was demonstrated during the preparation of the freeze frames as the groups took some time to collaboratively think of a prediction and demonstrated abilities to try different body gestures, levels and facial expressions. We could clearly see that the students were highly engaged and noise levels were not as high as the previous weeks. This illustrates the value in setting expectations and criterias to assist in decreasing misbehaviours and off-task behaviours.  

As such, Ewing and Simons (2004) reiterate that providing students with opportunities to translate their own thoughts and ideas into a tangible form engages them with the creative dispositions (for example: aesthetic consciousness, ambiguity). For example, through the drama activity, students are generating imaginary predictions and ideas which are then clarified and communicated to each other through a freeze frame. Here, students are engaging in a variety of other skills as they are “creating and developing their ideas individually and collaboratively, communicating them in a variety of aesthetic forms” (Baldwin, 2012, p. 70). This as such, deepens their own thinking, develops collaborative work, and promotes active listening and creativity (Baldwin, 2012). To improve on this drama lesson, implementing the tapping-in strategy will further increase engagements with creativity as it requires students to think in the mindset of their character. As a concluding activity, hot-seating the different characters the students portrayed and the characters from the book allows participants to “expand their understanding through questioning” (Anderson, Hughes and Manuel, 2008, p. 130). It enables us to understand motives, attitudes, mannerisms and perspectives that underlie the character’s actions and personalities (Anderson et. al., 2008). 

[integratingthearts-blog]

Week 9 in-school experience

To ensure that students fully engaged with their artistry, the first part of the lesson focused on craft and design, allowing students to finish off their planets. Working in their galaxy table groups, the students then decided where they wanted to place their planets onto the galaxies. During this time, we stressed the importance of working collaboratively and working as a team to figure out the placements for the planets. However, many groups argued and had trouble coming towards a conclusion. Despite this, the galaxies turned out well, as it demonstrated the students’ abilities to engage with their aesthetic consciousness, self-expression, imagination and spontaneity. These core creativity dispositions were further heightened throughout the two art lessons as they were student-centred, enabling them to make their own decisions and individualise their own art-making. Ewing and Gibson (2011) reiterate the importance of this, as they suggest that a step-by-step procedure to produce an artwork is controlling and restricting, which does not foster creativity and high levels of enthusiasm.   

Whilst it is suggested that art lessons can be loud, it was difficult to draw the students’ attention back once they have all finished their galaxies, despite implementing a variety of behavioural management strategies, such as clapping and call and response. Upon reflection, it would have been effective to set clear expectations in the beginning of the lesson with regards to following instructions, noise levels, collaboration within groups and responding to teachers to decrease these problems. Therefore, this was a goal that my teaching partner and I had in mind for the remainder lessons.  

Moreover, art appreciation was implemented during the rest of the lesson to ensure that students had opportunities to marvel, explore and appreciate the complexities and ambiguities of their artwork and art in general. As such, the decision to incorporate art appreciation in this lesson was for the students to develop an appreciation of their artwork and engage in reflection. Unfortunately, there was not enough time to really allow students to engage with art appreciation, therefore we incorporated 2 Stars and a wish. This allowed groups to collaboratively reflect upon the two things they did well and one thing they could improve upon. To ensure that students were scaffolded, sentence starters were provided, giving them ideas on what to reflect upon. However, explicitly modelling and verbalising the thinking process and providing examples would have made this clearer for the students. Some groups had trouble reflecting on their artwork and using the correct vocabulary. In tandem with this idea, White (2011) reiterates that students should experience the thought processes and perspectives from a learner as teachers can model and verbalise their own thinking. This results in the development of student learning and “articulates their learning more clearly” (White, 2011, p. 483). 

(Example of a star) 

As evident, the students did engage in some reflection, allowing them to directly focus on their own artwork. To improve on this art appreciation, peers could also provide feedback to one another and learn about a different perspective. Also incorporating Felman’s Inquiry Model will enable students to attain a richer understanding of any artwork and build upon their art vocabulary. Therefore, teaching vocabulary geared towards art would also be useful for other lessons.  

What I took out the most from this lesson was the importance in setting behavioural expectations and providing W.I.L.F. (what I’m looking for) for students. Because we did not do this and jumped straight into the lesson, the behaviour got a little out of hand at times as some students were not listening, whilst others argued with each other and were not able to work collaboratively. From here on, it is essential that we do this before the start of the lesson to gain more control of the classroom. 

[integratingthearts-blog]

Week 8 in-school experience

Flooded with a variety of ideas for aesthetic space and galaxy artworks, the internet inspired our lesson and allowed us to provide students with an imaginative learning experience. As such, rather than briefing students on the focus and activity of the lesson, I told the students that a little birdie flew by my window during the morning and dropped a letter that looked like it had travelled from across the globe and was addressed to the class. The letter said:  

Dear 4SM,

My name is Peter Potter and I am an astronomer! That is, someone who studies the planets, stars and other natural objects in space. I am writing this letter to you because when I sat down outside yesterday night with my hot chocolate and looked up at the stars, I noticed that they were the same, ordinary stars. Beautiful, but ordinary. So, then I took out my telescope and peered through and noticed how dull and uncreative our solar system looked. I have proposed that we change the design of our solar system and galaxy to make it more fun and pleasant to look at! I have been told that you are all very creative and imaginative, can you all please help me design the galaxy? Create some unique designs, ones that we have never seen before? I really look forward to seeing these!

Kind regards,

Peter Potter

This provided a more creative take to the start of the lesson in the hope that it would engage the students. Upon reflection, the students seemed engaged, asking questions about the letter, the delivery bird and whether the scientist was a real astronomer. The students worked in table groups (6 groups of 5) and were required to recreate the galaxy. This was done in a rotation method, whereby two groups used white spray paint, stars and other art details to decorate a blank, A3 black cardboard which served as the galaxy. Whilst the remainder groups created planets that needed to fulfil the checklist requirements: 

The checklist provided avenues for students to explore visual conventions (for example: line, shapes, colour and balance) that are most commonly used in diverse artworks (Pascoe, 2018). This is because students were required to include different colours, patterns and dealt with the placement and arrangement of the visual elements. With this, providing the class with a success criteria that reinforced what the planets and galaxy needed to demonstrate ensured that they had goals to work towards. Furthermore, this kept the students on-task, despite being quite noisy, as they understood what they needed to achieve by the end of the lesson. 

Student work samples: 

(Planets and stars)

(Galaxy)

In hindsight, the work samples illustrated that the students were able to communicate their creative thoughts and imagination through the creation of their own planets. Evidently, each student had their own individualised planet which illustrates the notion that art has the potential to “strengthen self-understanding and can foster confidence about being unique” (Ewing and Gibson, 2011). Some students had difficulties coming up with a planet that fulfilled the criteria, therefore I asked these particular students to think of their favourite shape, food or object and use that as a stimulus to guide them. As such, some students created planets that resembled pizzas, chocolate and donuts. Clearly, the students were creating a design that represented their own realities, drawing on them as a source of ideas which makes the task relevant and meaningful. This is heightened by Pascoe (2018, p.8) who reiterates that a key principle for teaching the Arts is for it to “be meaningful for students, relevant, engaging and focused.” 

Furthermore, the creation of the planets could be modified in future lessons by providing students with an array of materials to work with, rather than just textas and coloured pencils. This will allow students to experiment and play with a wide-range rather than being restricted to the traditional materials. Pascoe (2018, p. 66) reinforces this notion by suggesting that quality lessons allow students to “learn to manipulate and adapt a wide range of physical materials and technologies.”   

[integratingthearts-blog]

Week 5 - Pre-school visit

Provided with the concepts of Transformations and Space as the lens for the Creative Arts experiences over the next couple of weeks with year 4, my teaching buddy and I decided to teach the different strands. This is to ensure that we gain as much teaching experience across the Creative Arts to broaden our repertoire.   

The pre-visit enabled us to also see the dynamics of the classroom, the layout and the teacher’s teaching style. Upon reflection, we were warned that the students are extremely noisy and chatty, which proved to be true as the teacher kept needing to draw in their attention. Also, the tables were set out in rows and it appeared that the classroom did not engage with lots of art. As such, the teacher suggested to do some sort of artwork with the students in relation to space and told us that students do drama once a week with an external teacher. From this visit, we understand that over the following weeks, we need to think of different behavioural strategies and set expectations to ensure the students are behaving and providing us with their devoted attention.