November 20, 2015 Music

Last Friday I went to observe in the the music classroom again.  I got to spend about 3 hours there and it was a very great learning experience.  The 3rd and 4th graders were doing their recorders and it was really fun to see the difference between the two grade levels.  The 3rd grade needed more work with the recorders, which makes sense because they are younger.  There were more students on the very first song still.  The 4th graders most of the students were taking their test to past the 2nd song.  The students seemed to really like the recorders, and the 4th graders did a really good job with the warm activity that the teacher was teaching them.  They both got the same warm up activity and they had to clap out the rhythm that was a rhythmic pattern of eighths notes and quarter notes.  It was fun watching the students with that because I could remember being in music class and struggling with eighths notes.  The 5th grade got to work on a worksheet about country music and then when they were done they got to do their turkey trot songs.  One of them was a pumpkin pie polka and the other one was a hip hop turkey.  The students being 5th graders you could tell they wanted to dance but they thought that they were to cool to dance but eventually everyone started to dance and just have fun.

November 5, 2015 Music

I got to go in today and observe a 5th grade music class.  The teacher is responsible for organizing the Veteran's Day celebration and the 5th grade classes are the ones who will mostly be presenting it.  It was really neat to see all the different things that went into making a assembly like this one and I didn't really know or understand all the work that went into one.  That being said the 5th graders who had solos did wonderfully when their parts came and the students did a wonderful job singing they all sounded really superb.  One of the songs they did was America and the teacher was going to have a select few students play the Orff instrument however, that did not go over well.  The students got lost at multiple points in the song and many of them were either off on their notes or off on their tempos.  The teacher made the decision at the end of the class to do away with them because she didn't have enough time to really teach the students and get them to be confident playing it.  I don't blame her most of the students had never played an instrument and none of them understood what conducting was so I think she will have to take baby steps with these students.  I had a thought of fun with these students today, they all seemed very excited about their upcoming performance.  I am just sad that I will not be able to see them perform it.  They have worked so hard.

November 5, 2015 Art

Today I went and observed in the Art Classroom. The class was a 4th grade class and they were finishing up their Veteran's Day projects.  Most of them were done so the rest got to free draw.  I like the idea of free draw.  The teacher has binders with the teach me to draw books in them and the students are always pulling them out.  I also like to just walk around and look at what the students who don't pull one of those books out are drawing and I was very impressed.  Some were free handing animals and bugs from their own memory and making them their own.  Others were creating almost tye-dye looking patterns with markers.  I also got to witness a very special drawing that I must say I was greatly impressed came from a 4th grader.  The picture started off as just a simple picture of flowers in a sky, however, then the little girl put words on her paper and it changed how I viewed the picture.   The more words that she put on the more impressed I became.  "Every flower is different, no one flower is alike."  "Everyone is perfect just how they are." These were things that were written on her paper, and I thought it was amazing because I didn't expect it to come from a 4th grader and I just hope as she moves through her school life she never loses sight of that.  I do have some things I did not like about the class and that was how the teacher manage her students.  Her students had gotten a tad noisy a couple of times and yes after the first time they should have followed the rules however, the students were talking about their art and not just nonsense.  I feel that the classroom wasn't as loud as the teacher made it out to seem.  Since the students were free drawing and sense most of them were finished with the projects I feel that the amount of talking was completely acceptable.  These poor students are supposed to be sitting in a classroom quite for most of the day and for an hour I think the teacher could of let the talk with their tables and neighbors because it was an off day and they didn't have something they needed to get done.