Sculpture

In the reading Golomb compares drawing to clay referring to clay as a "reversible medium" that can be added to and subtracted from.  I think that the students enjoyed this aspect of clay, knowing that if something went wrong all they had to do was return to a ball or remove a piece or add clay. For the most part students seemed to thoroughly enjoy the project which I would attribute to the subject matter of the actual project and the medium it's self. Based on the excitement about working with the clay and the way the students handled it I would have to assume that they have not had a lot of opportunities to work with clay. I would agree with Golomb in saying that working with clay is often avoided because of its messiness, time consumption, and the space it requires.
During this project most students focused entirely on the front of the creature and ignored the back. Golomb talks about modeling of sides and how four year-olds already consider all sides of a clay creation. I think this may have been due to the amount of time the students had to work on their creatures and the type of sculpture they were making even though a few students to work on the back of their creatures by either adding pieces of clay or smoothing out the clay. I am really excited to see how they paint their creatures and if they put any detail on the other sides of their creatures.

Gender and Violence

Every since Saturday Art School began there has been a strange separation between the boys and the girls. Behavior in social situations, subject matter in drawing, and attention to work has been almost completely separated by gender. Duncum writes about the differences in choice of subject matter between boys and girls. He gives trains, superheros, battle scenes, and adventures as a few examples of what boys chose to draw in comparison to pets, flowers, butterflies, and gardens which girls chose to draw. The first week of class was the best example of this type of situation with most of the boys drawing things like knights and dragons while the majority of the girls drew pictures of themselves and the friends. This past week is the farthest they have gotten away from this that I have noticed, which I believe to be due to Halloween, students of both genders drew pumpkins.
So far we haven't had any violent images created that I know about, the closest we had to violent images what a sign that read "I heart blood" inserted into a altered drawing of a bedroom. One thing that I do notice a lot of is reproduction of images from the internet and t.v. which could lead to violent images. Gaye Green talks about the influence that violent media has on children focusing largely on the violence in the t.v. show The Simpsons. I think this could easily become a problem in a classroom that would be difficult to manage, but might be handled with the removal of free drawing. The removal of this type of assignment may get rid of a lot of unwanted subject matter but it may also hinder the creative process

Saturday Art School Week Two: Related to Hurwitz and Day

This Saturday went very well for our class in my opinion and calmed my nerves completely for probably the rest of the semester. The main objective for the class was to learn to mix colors with paint which I taught through a demo. Hurwitz and Day support this process in saying :"Watching a concept develop as a process is explained is not only fascinating to children but arouses a desire to begin seeing for themselves how to handle new materials and ideas." This method seemed to be the most effective as it was a lot easier to teach students how to mix colors by doing it in front of them than it would have been to try to tell them how to wet the paint correctly and how to get the paint into the pallet (we were using the tempera cakes which made the process a little different and a little more difficult.). Students were also shown how to create monsters using the paint blobs created with the primary and secondary colors. I was amazed at how well the creatures came out and how excited the students were to make them.

some students even listed where these monsters could be found

  Hurwitz and Day also talk about student motivation and the importance of using intrinsic motivation rather than always using extrinsic motivation. The first assignment on Saturday was to draw a place that they see everyday in their sketchbook. I think that having the students draw something that was that much of a part of their life was a form of intrinsic motivation as they all wanted to show/share a part of their life with the rest of the class. Overall I think the class went very well and I am very excited for the second part of my lead teaching section.

Saturday Art School week one: Understanding children as artist

The nervousness from this Saturday has continued even into today, still wondering "what did the students think, what are their parents thinking?". Even with all the nervousness I do still think that the class went very well and that the students enjoyed it. I was extremely impressed with the students art and their creativity. The students all seemed to embrace the project more than I had hoped for and were very excited about the theme of dinosaurs, dragons, and other imaginary creatures. Although some of the students drew things they had seen before, such as the student who drew the nyan cat, the majority of them drew incredible imagined creatures. One student drew a giraffe/peacock creature, another drew a two headed cat, I was amazed at how creative they were and at the quality of their art. I think the students' level of engagement with the project made for a higher quality of art, they put more effort into something that they were interested in.
I think we had a few problems during the class, but not enough to ruin the class. We had a few issues with timing and trying to keep things moving. Students wanted to continue working on their pictures when it was time to move on and it wasn't easy to tell them to stop doing something they were so interested in. We also had a table of boys who would not stop talking to each other. I told them several times that they could only talk if they were continuing to draw, but in the end they were behind and needed more time before we could move on. Overall I think the class went very well and it was a very enjoyable experience that I am looking forward to repeating next week.

Relfective Teaching

Frank D. Susi stresses the importance of using reflection as a tool to grow as an art teacher and to better lessons. Reflecting allows you to have a greater understanding of what took place and think about ways to change anything causing negative outcomes. Through reflection we learn a lot in our lives, like trial and error. When something doesn’t work we reflect on it, even if only for a few seconds, and to find out why it didn’t work and what we can do differently to make it work. Susi uses this process in the classroom to reflect on the teaching process and the student responses to find out what went well and what could go better.

Susi listed three different types of reflection: reflection-on-action, reflection-in-action, and reflection-for-action. Usually when I think of reflection it is reflection-on-action, thinking back to what already took place, but I think that reflection-in-action takes place a lot more than I notice, even while writing this it is taking place. Reflection-for-action combines both outcomes and is necessary for improving strategies.

I observed a teacher a year or two ago who taught art from grades one to five in an elementary school. What she found to be the most helpful in teaching was reflection and she constantly told me about the importance of good reflection. She always had every class planned out in detail but was ready to change any plan based on what was being observed at the time, or by reflection-in-action. Susi says that “Reflection involves looking back on experiences as a way to reconsider and better understand what happened”, which is something that should be happening constantly through our teaching experience.

Golomb 2 and 3

I found the most interesting idea in these two chapters to be the idea of play as a sort of coping mechanism.  On pages 107 and 108 Golomb talks about an 18-month-old boy who played both with a spool and in the mirror to cope with the disappearance of his mother. His mother’s leaving distressed him and caused him to have anxiety, which seems to be a common occurrence in children. Golomb explains “by playing games of disappearance and reappearance he mastered his anxiety and reassured himself that his mother would also return”. learning or knowing this coping strategy at this age seems like it would be very helpful in the future when anxiety like this would reappear if not already taken care of at a younger age.

Golomb revisits this idea in the section about play therapy, pages 129 through 131, in my opinion, when she talks about play helping children to “express some of his or her concerns”.  I think the whole idea of acting out a problem repeatedly to deal with the stress and anxiety it causes is extremely sophisticated and amazing to come naturally to children of such a young age. I never learned to do this for the separation anxiety specifically, I remember back to when I was 6 being filled with anxiety and convinced that my parents had died as that seemed the only logical reason for their tardiness.

Observation drawing with children chapters one and two

The idea that caught my eye and stayed with me the most was the idea of the three meanings found in an observational drawing. When ever I think of drawing as a narrative I immediately start to think of the typical comic strip. I want a narrative to have a beginning and an end, to tell a clear story.

According to the reading a narrative can be a single simple fame and can convey the same message which it goes on later to show with a great example which is a very common thing drawn by children. For some reason I've always believed narratives to be too complicated for children which the more I think about it is a ridiculous assumption. Since they were able to talk my nieces have told me stories, non-stop, seemingly endless stories about the most mundane things you could think of, and these stories are also shown in their drawings.

The meaning as a metaphor reminded me of the symbolic art drawn by younger children on a much more sophisticated level. The younger child's art may look like something crazy and incomprehensible but represent a very real thing, while the art in this book is a very real item that may represent something intangible, such as a baseball glove representing the love of a father. This is something that I have not seen very much of in children's art but more in the art of adolescents and usually high school students.
The last meaning, expressive, is something with which I have always struggled with. It is a style that amazes me, the idea that you can convey so much emotion through an image is amazing, but not something that I fully understand. Hopefully through this experience I will gain a greater understanding as to why everyone, at least in this culture, interprets a certain type of line to be angry, or playful, or sad.