What worked well for this art experience? Why?

  Something that really worked well for this art experience was that my group did a really good job of not providing the students with too much instruction to begin with. Like we learned from Allison, we gave our students simple instructions which made it much easier for them to comprehend. Another thing that worked really well was how we introduced our project.  In theory when working with special needs students, providing a concrete, physical example of what is going to be made helps the kids really grasp the idea. We showed our students physical examples of what they would be starting with and what they would end up with after finishing the project. This worked really well because the students were automatically more interested in the project, many of them asking to hold the examples. Something that worked really well for our preparation was that we laid out all our different  materials on paper plates and put one of each plate full of materials on each table. Putting the materials on plates instead of just loosely on the table I think was a big win for my group. Not only did it make cleaning up super easy for the kids to help with, it also kept our tables fairly clutter free.

What didn’t work well for this art experience? Why?

    To me this experience completely opened my eyes to how teaching isn’t as intimidating once you just jump into it. Despite something’s not going smoothly. For example something that didn’t work to well was the amount of paint we put out on the paper plates for the kids. We used about a dollar coin sized dollop and by having so much paint readily available the students had a tendency to use a lot of paint to paint their rocks which made the drying time much longer. Another thing I noticed didn’t work well was, that lots of the students had either finished their rocks or were waiting for rocks to dry when we had lots of class time left. Having the project not span the entire class didn’t work well because although we offered the art cart and the idea of making rock valentines, the students seemed to lose interest after their rocks were finished. One last thing I noticed that didn’t work was that our effort to get the Aids to create their own rock beside the student, a few of them still completely did it for them instead. This is something I think in the future I can communicate better with the Aids and ask if we can try and get the students to participate as much as they can.

What would you do differently?  Why?

   As a result of this experience I have definitely learned that there are somethings I can change in the future to make the class run more successfully. One thing I would do differently is next time talk to the aids as the class settles down and ask them if they can assist the students but not do the project for them. I think this is important to talk about and ask what my students with more serious physical disabilities are capable of doing. Can they use their hands at all? Can an aid put a paintbrush in my students hand and then help guide their hand instead of using the paintbrush alone? I think these are important things to discuss so that I can really make sure my future lessons are lessons that ALL my students can participate in and really be a part of creating the artwork. Another thing I will change in the future is if I am using paints with my students I might go around to child individually and ask what colors they would like and give them a dime size amount of paint to begin with. I think by doing this I can prevent waste of paint and reduce the drying time on future projects. For preparation I think the only thing I would change is to have my group meet in person once to go over our lesson plan before we meet to set up for our class. Although we all worked well and bounced off each other, we still had to refer to the lesson plan throughout teaching.