The Art-venture

Started the week with an ITP follow up session with my class at AST on Monday, and I have to say that session was something I didn't feel I needed until I was there. Sharing the past month's ups and downs with my class, and getting to listen to others' challenges and success stories truly helped put my experience into context and inspired me to do more and be better. This week was the first official week of art lessons for the P1 & P2s. While the P1s were introduced to their new topic for Term 4 - Nature, P2s were starting on a new art task that was still related to Term 3's topic. Took some time to go through the agenda for each week of term 4 with Mawar, factoring in the many year-end event disturbances, and that really helped me clarify the flow of lessons and expectations for each lesson. I felt that the added clarity helped me manage my lesson time. With a clear idea of the lesson objectives, I was able to reiterate it succinctly, and students were clear on...

This week marked the start of the last school term this year! In preparation for the hand over of my classes to Mawar, I spent this week tying up the loose ends of Term 3 with my P1 and P2 classes. Reflections were completed and filing was done. I realized that the giving and receiving of instructions were key for the procedure to be done as smoothly as possible. It can be chaotic, as students audibly struggle to file in their artworks and repeatedly ask questions to which answers were already provided. The good thing about taking multiple classes at one level was that I got reinforcements as to which methods flowed better and which needed improving. With the P1s, instructions were best to be simple, straightforward and purposeful. Getting the P1 students to check the file for the presence of a contents page upon receiving their files was unwise as students processed that instruction as me asking them to take out their contents page. I had only wanted them to look for it and approach...

This week marked the last week of lessons for term 3! It was also time for my P3s to reflect on their learning in their weekly ceramics lessons with the external vendor. Lesson reflection was something new for me. I was excited to try out my ideas in facilitating students' reflection on their learning thus far but was also apprehensive about its' effectiveness since they hadn't been 'tried and tested'! My mentor had prepared and printed out the reflection worksheets that served to guide students in thinking about the ceramic-specific knowledge they've gained. It also helped me structure my lesson. I started off by introducing the agenda for our last class of Term 3 - reflecting on their past ceramics' lessons. Though they were initially disappointed that they won't be having a hands-on ceramic lesson, students were re-energized by the new focus that was tied back to their topic of interest. I decided on a discussion format to facilitate their reflect...

This week, my P1 classes worked on creating their own paper sculptures of a certain part of their neighborhood with the cutting and folding techniques learnt in the past weeks (Theme: My Neighbourhood). Students were first guided to understand the meaning behind the theme. They were familiar with the term neighbors, hence, building on that knowledge of closeness in distance, the neighborhood was introduced as the spaces and places near where we stayed. Some examples of places in the vicinity of Tampines was introduced to help them better visualize the possible places they could create in their own paper sculpture. These images also got the children excited about creating their own paper sculpture as they recognized the various locations (Tampines Hub, playgrounds, etc.) and started asking about the 'buildability' of the places they had in mind! Given the choice to create any part of their neighborhood, students got the chance to engage in idea generation. Many of them went ...