TIGER ARTISTS LESSON PLAN/PRESENTATION REFLECTION Your Name___Chuting Cao__________________ Tiger Team #____1_______ Title of Lesson____Story: Characters_and What Makes Them_______________ Museum Exemplar_____Laokoon (sculpture)____________________________ Part 1 (before) Present a brief description of lesson. In this lesson, we focus on the big idea character. Generally, the lesson is made of three parts: viewing art, discussing art and making art. In viewing and discussing art, they will see some characters showed by PowerPoint, and discuss the personality, identity, positive and negative of theses characters. And we will also bring then to museum to do VTS with a classic sculpture Laokoon. Let them see and discuss both contemporary and classic visual art. In making art, we will let them create their own characters and show their unique perspectives and personalities.
State instructional goal(s) of lesson in behavioral terms. Tell what you expected the students to know and be able to do at the end of the lesson? Character is a main element for making up a story. During this lesson, I hope the students will know this big idea more deeply: they will know what makes one character unique in visual art, what features make a character positive or negative, how to create a character with certain personality and perception. And they will also learn some skills to paint with chalks.
What did children already know related to your goal(s)? Since the range of children is 8-13, I think they have seen a lot of movies and read many stories. They should know the differences between various characters. And they can also tell who is the good guy and who is the bad guy in a story. They may have some abilities to draw and paint some characters.
What resources did you use and refer to in planning or during presentation? We use the images of characters who are very popular in the movie. And we choose one piece of sculpture in museum of art and archaeology. We buy some supplies such as black papers, chalks and dice from Michael’s. During the lesson we use Smartboard to present PowerPoint.
Part II (during) What did students learn? Provide evidence of student learning. How would you assess them? They learned how to distinguish the personalities of different characters from their appearance. And they can create their own characters with certain personalities. Moreover, they can talk about the personalities, status, perceptions of the characters. An important evidence of students learning is their artwork. The artworks turned out to be very beautiful and all of them represented a rich and lively character with the personality we gave them. Another evidence is they were very active to discuss the artworks both from the professional artists and themselves. What’s more, the parents felt very satisfied with their artwork and what the kids learned. I think they are excellent.
Did some students have difficulty participating in the activities? If so, what did you do to make it possible for them to participate? Yes, there were some students did not know how to create a character by themselves. Since we limited the personalities of characters, it may be a kind of difficult for them to create. I did an example first, and explained why I used these details to make it, what was the relationship between the details and the personalities. I think it was a good help. And one older girl met the problem that she could only draw something reality, but cannot create something like cartoon, we helped her step by step(such as tell her how to make a head and a lip), and finally she finished her work and the work was really good.
Evaluate student questions/answers/participation o What ideas did the students share during the lesson? At first, they just shared what were their favorite characters and the reasons they liked them. When doing VTS, they shared a lot of information of their own observations about the sculpture. And after finished their artmaking, they shared their ideas about why and how they made their artworks. o Did students share ideas that stretched/challenged their classmates? Yes. It is obviously when we were doing VTS. They had different opinions about the snake and the kids in the sculpture. And some students developed new ideas based on others’ ideas, they could even connect different ideas and make a new one. o Did student questions display higher level thinking skills? Yes. When they were making art, some students asked me very specific things like which shape of body to this character can make it sillier, super wide or just round? If I added a red eye to this character, would it be more evil? I think in these questions, I can know they were really thinking about the big idea character very deeply, and worked hard to create it. o How did you decide to use student ideas during the lesson? When they mentioned something helpful ideas about characters, we used it as an example and analysis it. When doing VTS, we used the students ideas to develop others thoughts about the visual artwork. o Did you evaluate each student’s answer and work in a nonjudgmental manner? Yes. I think it is very important to work in a nonjudgmental manner, and use neutral responses to every student. Since they are very young kids, if we are not so neutral, and respond them with different evaluation, some of them will feel bad and frustrated, no more active and passion about it, even loose the confidence and do not love art as before. So work in a nonjudgmental manner can help to let every student feel equal and keep active and passion.
How did you manage/organize the whole-class into discussion, demonstration, studio, closing?
It was not so hard to manage them. Because they had a great passion in art and love to discuss and make art. Some of them were really active, only we should do is to lead them to every object of our lesson plan and manage the time of them. Part III (after) Was/were your instructional goal(s) appropriate? How did you meet the needs of all of your students? Yes, I think our instructional goals were very appropriate for all of the students. Although the age range of the students is very wide, the big idea we chose is suitable for everyone for the reason that kids all like stories, and all of them have their favorite characters. Moreover, all of them have a great interest in it. I think different ages still have different needs, so we tried to talk with them individually and helped them to solve specific problems.
Were your directions clear? Yes, my work was to make an example for them before they began to make art. And I think my directions were very clear. I told them all the reasons for the details I made to this character, and what was the relationship between the details and personalities of it. I also told them some skills of using chalks to help them make their works.
What worked and why? The characters we choose in the presentation on PowerPoint worked well, I think it is because these are the characters which the students are very familiar with, and the contrast of positive and negative figures are very sharp. The VTS worked. Maybe the sculpture is more lively than 2D things, and kids were interested in the story about laokoon. They really had a impressive discussion in the museum. The making art part worked. We choose the chalks and black paper, and let them do a sketch first. The material is good, and the artwork turned out to be great. The game worked. They really loved the game, and even played it twice. It is a good idea to use their own paintings as a part of this game.
What did not work and why? I think everything worked great.
Explain any changes you would make with regard to: o procedures you implemented o materials you used o questions you asked o room arrangement o activities you introduced I think there’s only one thing we changed during this whole lesson. We planned to use chalks painting on the ground, but we finally used black paper instead. The reason of it is the weather. The weather that day was wet, all of us thought it was not so good if we kept on painting outside on the ground. So we decided to use black paper and it turned out to be awesome material.
Did you model effective verbal and nonverbal communication?
Yes. I think the communication with students was very effective. We expressed and explained the big idea very clearly, and what we paint gave them great examples to their work. When they met some problems, we discussed them and solved it in an effective way. Part IV Reflection (1 page) It should be clear that much thought was put into these answers! • Did you make any “on-the-fly” decisions or changes during the lesson? If so, what were they? Why did these changes seem appropriate? • What did you learn from teaching this lesson? What was unexpected or unanticipated? • What new “Big Ideas” or epiphanies about teaching did you learn from this experience? • What did you learn about yourself, your students, and the curriculum? The biggest change during the lesson was the material we used for making art. We planned to use color chalks to paint on the ground outside. But that day the weather was not so good, it was a kind of wet, so we decided to move to classroom and paint on the black paper. The change was very appropriate because it maybe hard to work outside when weather is not good. And the wet will certainly affect the painting on the ground in a bad way. And the change was very successful. When we used chalks painting on black paper, it had a different effect, and we could even use more skills. For example, we can sketch it first and even erase the parts we don’t like, we can blend it to make the color very soft, and we can mix several colors together and blend it to make new colors. It was beyond our expectation and really cool. Finally they can even took them home. Another “on-the-fly” decisions is about the game we did during art making. The origin of it was some students finished their work faster than others. We don’t want to students to be boring and feel nothing to do. So one of us lead a game using the white board to create the character together. When students who finished their work faster and it had not been the time to begin the next part, they participated in another program. It turned out to be amazing, all the kids liked it and felt funny and interesting. We even didn’t know they would like the game so much. It was also unanticipated as the black paper, and also in a good way. I think this “on-the-fly” decision really made us learn a lot and think a lot. We should make multitasks when we plan the lessons, because things will always happen like this. Some students will be faster than others, and feel nothing to do even get boring then. So it is very important to think about what the “faster” students should do when they finished their tasks. But it should be a balance between these tasks, we should let students feel that it is a additional task, they can still keep on doing their things on hand, no need to worry about has something else to do next. Or, they will feel like there are so many tasks to do, and they should finish their work quickly and move on to next. What I learn is we should do multitasks and keep balance of it. I also leaned a lot to manage the time of the whole class. This time, we planned our time very specifically, and we were always worried about we had so many things to do and maybe there would not be enough time to do so much work. But the thing was opposite, we left more time than we expected to let them do the final board game. So when one
part became too fast or too slow, we should adjust the time a little. And as mentioned, to do the multitasks. It is also a good way to use multitasks to adjust the time arrangement. To myself, I felt it was really important to make a good example for students. When they looked at the things I paint, they felt it really awesome and cool, so they became more interested. And it made them can trust me faster, because they regarded me a good artist, and they felt like if they did what I told them to do, they would do as good as I did. There are more things I should learn from my peers. They are really excellent! Their performances are very natural and relax. The kids are very easy to communicate with them and find a common topic. Some of my peers are good at using body language to express our big idea. And it worked very well, I think the body language which full of the passion has a great help both on express the idea and attract the kids to make them more interested with the things they will do.