Charles Dickens Birthday!

I think in art it is important for several cross-curriculum topics within each art lesson. Many schools are now requiring integration and collaboration between art teachers and the fellow subject teachers, so with this while I am in school I try to integrate other subjects into my art lessons. So today I decided to brainstorm some on the fact that it is Charles Dicken's birthday!!

Everyone has heard of A Christmas Carol and even other stories like Oliver Twist by the infamous writer. So after a quick google search I came across an interesting integration that a ballet company has done for the schools that come see their A Christmas Carol shows.

The Ulster Ballet Company has a simple lesson plan for schools.

After skimming the lesson plan I thought of a simple way to bring literature, performance and art together. The lesson plan discusses the idea of performance with the piece but not only could students group up and perform a part of the book, they can create the costumes with it. With some brown paper bags, masks, yarn, and anything else they can come up with their own "stage" and do a short performance. This would also help with some social skills with working with each other, something every art class should have at least one project on.

But in my Pinterest search of Charles Dickens I came across this LOVELY design by Rachel Walsh. 

Rachel created this altered book to explain a Kindle to Charles Dickens. I think it is genius!

So today, how would you include Charles Dickens in an art lesson plan?

Pinterest

So most people today have heard of Pinterest. What some people may not know is the beauty of organization and the things that are even on the website.

What is Pinterest? Simply, a virtual pin board. A simple example is a girl planning her wedding, typically she would buy all the magazines, tear out her favorite pages, then put them in a notebook. Imagine that online. She could browse her favorite websites and "pin" her favorites to her board. Or if she does magazines, simply snap a picture & upload it (no need for annoying notebooks when you can just get it on your phone/computer!)

There is another reason I love Pinterest... the unlimited knowledge of education materials. You can just search "Art Lessons" and find so many different ideas.  Here are some examples of my boards that I use to organize some education stuff as well as some other useful things.

 

 

Really and truly you can use Pinterest for anything. People use it for clothing and style, wedding planning, home redecorating, cute animals, anything. 

Some tips for using Pinterest:

1. If you pin from a blog, make sure you click the blog post first. If you pin from the main page, eventually it will be harder to find the pin. But if you pin from the blog post you will always be able to find it.
2. Keep your pins organized. I find that I will organize mine once every couple of weeks because one board may become so big that I decided to divid it into different things "Like I would put sewing stuff under DIY but eventually made my own Sewing board"
3. Have fun! And find anything you want. I seem to find pins I love then go to the blog and love it too.

So please, if you haven't started, you must. Then make sure to follow me!

Transfer and Problem Solving

While sitting here doing my homework for my Educational Psychology homework, the main point in the questions was showing how metacognition, transferring, and problem solving is found in your focus area.

Dealing with transfer, which I feel like is one of the important factors of art (mainly with keeping it in the schools, they must be able to combine with with other subjects) and while looking up random things I came across this article The Arts and the Transfers of Learning. I have not read the article all the way through but I loved this chart that they had..

People must realize that the arts is in every subject and careers that they come across every day. 

But more or less I wanted to showcase a very simple (younger age but could easily be transfered to an older age) lesson plan that helps with problem solving (something I had to do for my questions for my ed psyc class).

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The every simple scribble drawing! Students will know they can only use three colors and no line could share the same color.

Day 600... something

It has been just over 2 years that I decided I was going to do studio art as a major. And not much after that did I decide to become a teacher.

So. I think this is a topic I can use to force myself to think of new ways and to brainstorm any ideas I need to save for my future job: being an art teacher.

Each semester I always try to figure out a new way to organize all my thoughts and ideas and the things I learn in class and for awhile Pinterest was working but now I want to have a hand in what I show people. So this is where the blog comes in!

I hope to use this for a couple things, I hope to use it to....

• share the things I learn in my class
• share any ideas that pop up for art lessons
• to share any art lessons I come across
• articles that seem interesting to me
• my own work
• anything else I feel like!

So for that... I will start today. Lets hope this is something that works out.