Kim then began the next lesson and using a powerpoint introduced the idea of villains to the class. She discussed different villains from movies that the students would know when relevant she also connected villains back to alter egos. Then she had the students "perform" a little bit to get them to better begin thinking about villains. The students all stood up in the circle and were asked to be a villain through posing, facial expressions, and noise making. It was semi-successful. Some of the students really enjoyed and embraced the activity while some of the student simply just stood around completely un-involved.
There is one key part of the day on Saturday which I can clearly label as the incident in our classroom this week. So last Saturday we finished our lesson a little earlier than anticipated so the students had some free time to work in their sketchbooks or we pulled out large sheets of paper for them to draw on. One student took his sketchbook and with Chris Sunday's help he made a "fort of doom" where in his sketchbook he worked out plans to take over the world. We got some really cool drawings from him and a few of the other students joined him. So Kim and I thought that it would be a cool idea to expand on this idea and create a larger fort for the whole class. So we again had some extra time at the end of the lesson and the students were able to use the time however they pleased. Our thought process is that the students would use the time creatively in the fort, this however was not the case. The fort became a center of complete chaos and no real art making was occurring inside of it. Unless we can come up with a way to avoid this incident from occurring again with the fort Kim and I feel like it will not remain a part of our classroom set-up.
The fort did not work out well. I believe that it was a distraction to the class because some students wanted to get done quickly to go into the fort. Not all the students went in because they were interested in completing their villain or drawing on the large pieces of paper that we had last week. I think that we should try our classroom without the fort this week because our lesson is to complete the 3D villain models so there will be more interation than just drawing. It might take longer because students will probably want to play with the model magic or sculpty before actually creating their villain.
ReplyDeleteI think that your classroom is already so congested that the fort may not work in the same way that it might if you had more space (or fewer kids)! As I mentioned in your post for this week, you might want to just let that come from the kids themselves, as they find spaces to be alone/together in the classroom in the times when they are not directly engaged in the projects you have planned. There is a fine line between provocation and distraction, and you want to do everything you can to veer toward the first and avoid the second. . .
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