As I look back to reflect on this past year and my experience in Arts Academy, I’m engulfed with feelings of contentment and excitment!  This peaceful contentment comes because the Arts Academy and our text, Creating Meaning through Literature and the Arts, has given me permission to live, teach and model the arts I love–the arts that bring richmess and fulfillment to the inner self.  The wonderful excitement comes through new friends, new skills, new ideas and all the many changes that have been made, not only in my own life, but also in the lives of my students and even in my school.

Long ago I read a poem about a kindergarten child so excited to be in school doing art work.  Then the teacher told the class exactly what to draw, how to draw it and what colors to use.  These instructions devastated the boy.  He wanted to draw his flowers in his own way.  The message from that poem stopped me from teaching art.  Sure, we still did art projects, but that’s not the same.  Then one of our Arts Academy instructors, Scott Flox, taught us how to do art by doing a draw along. Now we all drew the same thing in the same color using the same medium, but definitely not in the same way.  I feel this activity game me permission to teach art the same way in my classroom, and I have been truly astonished at the amazing differences in my students’ artwork.  Today I feel confident teaching the arts I love and watching as the children, too, are enriched.

This year with the Arts Academy has brought many changes to me, to my students and to my school.  I find myself integrating the arts daily, no longer afraid of making mistakes or doing something that would displease the administration.  Because I am creating and doing things I love everyday, I feel excited about teaching and have a creative release so that I feel less stress.  My students are proud to display their work, and frequently proclaim that they are artists or performers.  Usually at the end of the day when I announce that it’s time to clean up and go home, I hear choruses of “Ahh, no…not already.  We don’t want to go home.”

The trickle-down effect is leaking across the school.  My after school choir (made possible because of the teachings and wisdom I received from Susan Kenney and Jerry Jaccard in Arts Academy) was recently asked by the principal and PTA president to perform at the South Nebo Community Council that our school hosted.  The principal and several others praised us for the happy feeling our songs brought to the meeting.  At that meeting my class’s artwork was displayed as centerpieces.  I had previously received permission to display our little painted clay creatures in a glass showcase that had been empty for years.  Because so many parents and visitors had made such positive comments about the display during SEPs, we were asked to show them at the meeting, too.

The network of new friends formed at Arts Academy brings an added dimension to my life and my teaching.  It’s so exiting to collaborate with others who have the same interests and love for the arts.  Their positive attitude makes me feel like all things are possible!

The new skills I’ve learned at arts academy have enriched the lives of students in my class and in the choir.  I appreciate learning “The Seven Principles of Highly Effective Singing” and the warm ups and vocal play necessary to prepare for singing.  With Marilyn Berrett’s instruction I am finally gaining enough confidence to teach the principles of dance effectively.  You should see the excitement in my classroom when the children are instructed to push all the desks and chairs to the sides of the room!

The book and teachings of George Nelson has opened vast horizons of new ideas!  This has caused the most profound change in my teaching.  I approach each lesson differently than I ever did before because of his stepladder model and his philosophy (which rang so true that I adopted it as my own immediately!).  I have taught first graders to tell time by drawing huge clocks on the floor and choosing two children who lie down on the floor using their bodies as the hands and turning it into a relay.  At Arts Academy we collaborated on how to teach place value in a new, exciting way.  I tried this relay in my class, and it was such a hit that I went on t make relays of many more math concepts like 3 number addition and missing addends.  We’ve played games where each person is a number and has to find a partner to add up to larger numbers drawn on the floor, they then link elbows and rush to stand on that number.  We’ve danced to lines like we did in Arts Academy and added shapes to the dance, too.

The Arts Academy has given me more new friends, more new ideas, more new skills and made more changes in my life and teaching than I ever dreamed possible.  It fills my life and teaching with excitement, richness and fulfillment, making me feel whole and new.  Because of Arts Academy I am a better teacher, a better person.  Arts Academy has changed not only the way I teach, but my life as well.

Our first grade class has had an exciting time learning with, about and in, and through the arts.  The class had already learned about primary, secondary and tertiary colors and painted their own color wheels, so they were prepared with a bit of color theory.  I wanted to teach them about the artist Piet Mondrian and give them the opportunity to put this knowledge to use.

I was excited to learn myself that Mondrian thought all math should be mathematical and decided to use this idea to teach about lines:  parallel, perpenticular and intersecting.  This led to shapes that he incorporated into his paintings:  squares and rectangles.  We also included some social studies as we learned that Mondrian had left his home and teaching position in the Netherlands to study art in Paris.  After some time in France, he began to long for the cleanliness and order of his homeland and left the messy environs of Paris.  Once home again, he began to paint his new style of lines and boxes filled mostly with primary colors.

I made several different grids on the computer that were similar to Mondrian’s and let the children chose the style they wanted.  Then they chose the colors:  primary, secondary or analogous (those touching each other on the color wheel).  For older students, I would definitely have them make their own grids.  Our results were spectacular and have gained many comments from teachers and parents.

After our last session with the newspaper “sticks” I just had to add that component too, so they helped make the sticks and then we danced.  As I beat the drum, they moved.  When I gave a loud bang and a command, they moved to show that kind of line.  After several joinings and demonstrations of various lines, we moved to shapes and pregressed from tiangles and squares all the way to trapezoids and hexagons.  Teaching shapes and line was never so much fun!

For this assignment, I’m writing about integration of the arts with science.  In our water unit we learn about how we use water, the 3 states of matter (in relation to water) and the water cycle.  After learning a song about the water cycle to the tune of “She’ll Be Coming “Round the Mountain”, I created 2 more verses for water uses and states of matter.  The verses each have different motions, so the first graders love to get up and sing and move to the song.  Sometimes I “let” the children pick an accent to sing the last verse over–so far the favorites are baby talk, robot and cowboy style.

I’m working on using “Water Music” and dividing the class into 3 groups so each can dance one of the different parts of the the unit.  I’m especially excited to see what the water cycle and states of matter groups come up with.

So…in Breaking the Learning Barrier I’ve been reading about dramatic learning and decided to break down barriers today in our first grade, Johnny Appleseed day.  All week long, students were invited to bring apples to put in our apple basket with a promise that they would be making applesauce.  For math we did apple graphing for the way we liked apples best…standing on a large floor chart where our favorite was depicted.  We also did estimation of apples in a basket AND apple taffy in a jar, then counted the actual items and wrote that number too.  Some of the students were very close!  We did science when we described, drew and colored our apple, cut it in half and then did the description, drawing and coloring again.  We then included a taste test and a one or two word description.  For art, we made apple prints, cutting the apple both ways.  We started the applesauce with a peeler, corer, slicer as students arrived, cooked it in the crockpot all day and ate it just before going home.  I have a student in a self-contained class that I got permission to bring into the classroom to share in making the applesauce and to do other apple activities that were done during the time she is not usually in our classroom.

I feel the day was very successful.  Everyone who walked down our hall, teachers, aides and students, wanted to be in our class!  The students did  better with estimation than my previous classes and they enjoyed all the science, art and food.  They were able to come up with descriptive words easily and even wrote some about the taste of the apples and applesauce on their own.  Several children were happy just to take an apple home at the close of the day.