Art Gallery Visit

I didn't get to talk about the Two Rivers Gallery visit! I found that little field trip to be a great big breath of fresh air. It was nice to be in a different environment than our windowless room at the university. 
I liked the... activity?... that we had to do; creating a lesson plan in about 10 minutes that followed the criteria that we were given was fun. Using the paintings of Will Gill as our inspiration, we made a musical lesson plan that involves deeper meaning. 
If one were to do this exact lesson plan, however, I think that there might be some guidelines that needs to be covered first. Otherwise, I feel like some students might come up with some pretty gnarly lyrics to the song that we were creating as a class. 


Anyway, it was interesting to see what all the other groups came up with. My memory is a little foggy soo if you want to leave a quick comment on what your group's lesson plan was, that would be great! If you have already discussed your lesson plan in a blog entry, let me know! Comment away! If you have any questions about the lesson plan that my group did, ask away!

This may be my last post. If it is, I thank you for reading. I hope your holidays are spent with friends and loved ones.

Merry Christmas!

See you next year :D

Alex Stoney

Lights, Camera, Action!

I've been thinking about the different types of art we can create. I mentioned Kid Pix on my last post; today I want to talk about acting.
Waaay back last year in first semester, I observed a class that was doing a short drama activity. The teacher had pairs a students act out the exact same scene, only they were told to play them with different mindsets. There were jocks, teens, and a bunch of other types that I don't remember. The point being! We can do drama in our classrooms. This is a medium of art that I hadn't really thought of doing in the classroom before.
This was probably the simplest of lesson plans that this teacher had taught. I'm not sure what prior lessons took place but basically all she did was provide scripts for every pair of students and tell them how they were to act when it was their turn to present. She gave her class about 5 - 10 minutes to practice around the intermediate area of the school. After the class had come back, the acting began. After every pair of students had finished their scene, the teacher would ask who could guess who those students were acting as. The teacher of this class had me pair up with one of her students; we were supposed to act like teenagers. Basically I acted sarcastic and lazy; the class guess who we were supposed to be right away.

Anyway, this was a fun and engaging lesson that, I'm sure, touched on some PLOs.

Kid Pix!

If you're about my age, you'll remember Kid Pix. Dr. Kitchenham has commented that it is basically a PowerPoint program. I found his comment interesting because I have never thought of it as a PP program. I always thought of it as this cool art program that let you do whatever you can think of, and even more. Seriously, there were things on that program that blew my mind when I was a kid. The marker that changes colour when you use it? Awesome!
It's a program that you can use for serious objective based assignments or for just having fun and fooling around. I had no idea people were still using it until it was brought up in Tech Ed recently.

The biggest upside, in my opinion? You can get as messy as you want and you don't have to worry about cleaning it up. It lets kids experiment with what ever they can think of doing. They can take what they create and really like in Kid Pix and try to create it with materials around the classroom.

I just did a quick search on Google and came up with this site for Kid Pix lesson plans. There are probably quite a few out there...

http://www.bristolvaschools.org/mwarren/KidPixIdeas.htm