In the Classroom part 3 (Art/Music)

Hello,

                My name is Wintermute, and this is Dumbr, a blog of my time spent in Korea and some of my teaching methodologies. Today we are going to be talking about ways to handle your music and art classes. I understand that not all of you are singers and few are artist, so hopefully this will give you a few ideas of what to do in class.

Music:

                If you are like me your vocal talent can be compared to the sound of a cat stuck in a lawn mower. This can be very problematic as you could be teaching music class twice a week or more.  Obviously you are going to be using a radio and CD, but honestly that’s not enough to get your kids involved and makes it difficult on them to learn the words. The more into you get, the more into they will get.  You just kind of have to remind yourself you are doing it for the kids, they don’t care if you can’t sing or what you sound like, it’s just for fun.

                A few good tips: I put my music class at the very end of the day, before home time, it was the shortest period in the day and the kids were so tired most just slept through it anyway. I would waste a lot of time talking about what songs we would sing and have them tell me about the songs. Also you don’t have to sing every day, instead give them some large paper to draw with. Pick a song and have them draw out images of that song. This is actually a really good idea because it allows you to see if your kids comprehend the lyrics. It’s one thing for them to spout out random words in any given order, but can they comprehend them and understand what the song is talking about? Every teacher had their own method to test song comprehension, mine was drawing.

Art:

                Sad to say, I’m good at art. But that does not mean I want to overdo it every time art class comes up. Very rarely I had time to actually sit down and prepare a class, remember I had 30 minutes to plan 9 hours of class and do all of my school work like report cards, schedules, etc etc. So I made up a lot of simple projects you can do on the fly with little to no planning. Things like making a starry sky by taking a black piece of paper and a water bottle, fill it up with water and a little white paint, and then squirt the paper. I got some toy cars and paint, and let the kids roll the cars around on paper making paint streaks. You can get some of that floam stuff; it’s really cheap and not messy.  I did tie-dye with my kids, the Koreans did not approve, but the kids sure loved it. Point is it’s easy to come up with simple projects with little time on the clock. Look around and see what you got. Also there are plenty of sites to help with this sort of thing.

I could start a whole new blog on all of the art projects you can do. The point I’m trying to make is you don’t have to be some amazing artist or that creative, and you don’t even need a lot of time.  I hope all of this info helps you plan out better classes for your students and I will see you all tomorrow.

Your Teacher,

Wintermute