Reflection 14: Integrated Teaching

What?
During field I learned how important it is to integrate the arts into my teaching. The students love it, and it is a fun way to help them retain necessary information.

So What?
Now that I have learned how important it is to use the arts as a teacher, I plan to use them as often as a I can. They are very essential. During field is used the musical arts by teaching my students a song to help them memorize the five native american tribes that live in Utah. When I gave them a quiz in the names of the tribes the students asked if they could sing the song to help them on the quiz. I told them that they could. The scores of the quiz were very high.

Now What?
During field I wrote a journal of my experiences. As I use the arts in future lessons I will use this journal to recall things that I learned during this teaching experience to improve and build upon my knowledge of teaching the arts. I believe using the arts will teach students tools that will help them when they reach higher and more difficult classes.

Reflection 13: Field, The last two days :(....

I am really sad that field is over. It was such a great learning experience!!!! Though some things did not go according to plan, I am grateful for the things that I learned from the things that went wrong.

The last day of field, we gave a post assessment of the unit. It was so great to see the improvement of our students scores. It was a very satisfying feeling knowing that we taught them something and it actually stuck! I am really looking forward to becoming a teacher.

I really feel like we improved a lot over the course of field. I am a big fan of the "I'll wait until you are finished talking" technique! Works like a charm.

Reflection 12: Field Week 3

This week our students did their tribe presentations. They worked really hard on them and were really excited to show the class what they had learned as well as the special design of their posters.

It was really great to get to see all that they learned as a team, and to see their creative abilities.
The day our students presented was one of my favorite days. It was so rewarding as each group got up and talked about something that we taught them. All of the presentations ran really smoothly. The students that were not presenting, took notes on two things they learned from the presentation as well as one thing they liked artistically about the poster.

Reflection 11: Field Week 2

This is the week we began teaching our lessons. The first lesson we taught we taught our class a song to help them memorize the 5 Native American Tribes that live in Utah. The loved the song so much and learned it so fast. It really helped them to remember the tribes. I think the song will really bring up our post assessment scores compared to our pre assessment scores.

We did our second art lesson using visual arts. The students LOVED LOVED LOVED it. They thought it was the neatest thing they had ever seen. We had them tell there own Native American Legends by creating their own etching. They colored a sheet of paper with a variety of colors, painted over it with black paint and then etched out different symbols to tell their story.

I am learning how important the arts really are to students. It helps them to look at what they are learning from a different perspective.

Reflection 10: Field Week 1, 11/3-11/5

So far field has been going really well. We have been spending most of our time observing our teacher and learning the daily routine. We were able to teach the students a song. We did not integrate it with the core, because it was more to serve the purpose of the students getting to know Mckenzie and myself, and to get us comfortable in front of the class. We taught them a song to the tune of when Johnny Comes Marching Home. It is a song about Thanksgiving. We taught it to the students one line at a time along with hand actions to help the students learn the lyrics. They loved it, and learned the song in about twenty minutes. I really enjoyed teaching the students the song, and it was a great management tool. I look forward to teaching the students our Art integrated lessons. We are planning to teach the students a song to aid in memorizing the 5 Native American Tribes of Utah, and having the students learn a the Native American art  form of Etching.