And this conclude my last week at my current school. Saying goodbye to my colleagues and friends as I handover my work. I want to give a shoutout to all teachers, staff, students and parents for walking this journey with me. I'm filled with gratitude to be able to contribute and share my work.
Students had a blast with the introduction of air-dry clay. They tried using the cookie cutter method to churn out a high production of clay pieces, taking into consideration the craftsmanship and design. Some students accepted the challenge of making handbuilding work by combining function and form. There were a number of details to lookout for such as knowing how to distribute the pressure evenly so that the clay will be rolled out evenly, positioning of the cookie cutters to maximise the space, judging the thickness of the clay, smoothening the edges, preventing the drying clay from warping, what to do with remaining clay, painting on dried clay.
Most students love hands-on work and they learn best while working on something rather than excessive teacher talk. I always liken experiential learning with swimming. Would you learn better with more practices in the pool or from watching swimming videos?
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| Spray bottles work as well as rolling pins |
Hi! The children have completed their watercolour painting last week. To reiterate the learning outcomes from the previous lesson, they sort the air-dry clays according to warm and cool colours again.
Hi Teachers! The Primary One students have started using watercolour cakes to paint. We watched an instructional video in the previous lesson and talked through the things to bring for the following lesson. The children wrote down the one thing to bring - an empty container to hold water.
The painting day arrived and some students had forgotten to bring a container. Last week, a boy from one of the Primary One classes came up to me the moment I entered his classroom. He repeatedly thanked me for teaching him an important lesson that day and said that he will not forget to bring important things again. I was quite impressed by his response.
Children without water containers were given a set of coloured pencils instead. I mean what I said. And this reputation goes a long way and essential for classroom management. They could still practise the use of Warm and Cool colours even though the medium has changed.
I mostly rejected the use of lunchboxes as water containers and the best try goes to a kid who wanted to use a pen cap as a container. Yes, anything that looks like a vesselðŸ˜
Most children had painting experience but they will still enjoy when asked to do it. Thus, asking them to bring something isn't that difficult because responsibility is taught by leveraging on this activity. I do bring a few containers to class in case a child's container has cracked. Sometimes, it irks me to delay the lesson unit due to small hiccups but I try to think of the long-term benefit over the short-term inconvenience.
Hi Teachers! I have a new teacher, Ms J, joining me in my art classes this year. We started co-teaching the Printmaking unit. Ms J adapted some current resources and added new ideas of her own. The tuning-in activity included printing with LEGO bricks. She brought some from home and got the students to try printing with acrylic paint. It's funny how sometimes I think teaching is probably the only career that is widely acceptable to bring things from home for work purpose.
The uniform LEGO bricks produces interesting textures and shapes. While it might seem easy to carry out the activity, we had to remind them that the amount of paint that is picked up by the brick will determine if the print can be seen clearly. There is a way to coat the paint evenly before printing without the use of brayer in this case. Another point to note is that students have a tendency to use the brick like a paintbrush so the imprint of the LEGO bricks is not visible.
In the following lesson, students watched a video on making collograph and they sketch out a robot collography on their sketchbook. It's inherently important to discuss some common 'mistakes' in Printmaking because there are just too many elements to watch out for. It's great if students can just discover these elements but that would mean some students will not feel successful when the time runs out. As students need to do more than one print to get their ideal ones, they show the deconstructed parts of their sketch first and then transfer the drawings to a piece of foam before cutting and pasting them on a piece of cardboard. Next, the placement of the parts also determine the intricacies of the final print. Having the parts pasted without gaps would just yield a big blob of ink while gaps that are too distance will make the work looks sparse.
A book that shows how composition can affect the viewers is Picture This: How Pictures Work by Molly Bang. The author uses the story of Little Red Riding Hood and illustrations of graphic artworks to tell a story that engages the affective domain.
It's because of how the focus changed this time that the students were more invested in the layout of their artbooks. Rather than just separating illustrations and text on each page, making their stories seem very predicable and mundane, the current students put more thoughts into planning and making full use of the limited space which in turn produces more visual elements.
