Paint can be very messy

Week 3: Dancing with Paint.

The third lesson for Saturday school was rough. Instead of dancing with paint it turned into chaos with paint. The students had fun and they were very much interested, however the lesson was not structured. The little things, like placement of materials, putting names on work, clean up time, and disposing of garbage, really mattered for the organization of the class. I failed as a teacher to even include that in the planning. Even though I taught without my partner and had to lead every part of the lesson, I missed out on a lot of things. Mostly, I wasn’t prepared for the outcome. In my mind, I imagined the students would have enough room to do their lesson, but as they were working on the big activity, I noticed that the tables were very cramped and since the big activity was on the table that left barely any room to draw on the table.

I could mention all of the negative things that happened on this day (the planning, the purpose of the activity and tying it back to the theme of the lesson, not clarifying the centers/big activity……), but what I’ve learned from Kris and Chris is that one of the things that matters is the student’s interest in the activity. They seem interested in the lesson. At first, some students said that dancing was boring, but I tried to take dancing to another level by demonstrating how paint dance on canvas. I believe that the first demo was my most successful part of the lesson. The students were very involved in how I splashed and dabbled paint on the canvas using different paint tools. They even started laughing when I made a sound for each tool that I used. This was definitely one of my favorite parts of the lesson.

Although the lesson did not go as planned, I really learned a lot. Teaching is not just about the big idea of the lesson, but being able to organize, clarify, and knowing the purpose of the lesson. If you can’t determine the purpose of the lesson, then the students won’t know it either. So, for the next lesson, I will work more on those 3 steps.

I wish I had pictures to share with everyone, but I did not take any. There are some pictures on our flickr account of the day. If anyone has any pictures from my class, please share.