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.
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.
