Tuesday, May 17, 2005

 

What I learned from our first art camp

Running this art camp has been a good experience for me as a teacher. This is the first time I have had to come up with my own curriculum. In my two years teaching at Purdue, I only had to come up with bits and pieces of the course work, but here, with the help of Jonathan, I was responsible for all of the activities we did with the children. We decided to have the children make marionettes, write stories, and then perform the stories with the puppets. I was hoping this would be a good indication of what their daily life was like.

The children seemed to enjoy the week, but I was a bit disappointed. The classes seemed a bit chaotic. I think the problem was the age difference in the children. We had children as young as 6 and as old as 13. While the older children seriously worked on the puppets, the younger children got bored. They have a shorter attention span and sometimes had trouble understanding what we were doing. I think this workshop would have been more successful if the children were closer in age, but that is always a challenge of the teacher- different levels of ability.

Comments:
Maybe you can get the older kids to help the younger kids, like a buddy system. Young kids will often behave better if they just have someone to pay attention to them.
 
Post a Comment

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?