Friday, February 4, 2011

How Can You Integrate Art Into Your Classroom?

Art is a great asset in the classroom but a lot of teachers worry about if they have enough time to include art in their daily schedules. What they don’t realize is that they can bring art into math, language arts, history, and many more subjects. “Integrating art across the curriculum brings novelty and breaks the daily monotony of “classroom work.” Students enjoy exploring and tapping into their creative side. Art unifies teaching lessons and is the accent to classroom lesson plans” (Lopez). This quote is from one of my resources and it really showed me how much art can bring into the classroom. It can make learning fun, creative, and it will help students who might struggle in certain subject areas.
I found some great ideas on how to integrate art into my classroom. The first idea that I liked was to have my students listen to different genres of music each month, and have them write in a journal about how the music makes them feel and what it reminds them of. I also love the idea of having my students create their own illustrations for a book while I read it to them. This will help them bring their imaginations to life, and it will be really fun for me to see what they are seeing in their minds while I read to them. One thing I remember doing while I was in school was making Native American art and creating Pueblos. I have also seen this during my practicum experience in level II. When I created my pueblo in elementary school, it was fun for me because I not only was able to do art, but I was also able to learn more about the Native American culture. In fourth grade I remember using the cognitive domain. In my class that year we were learning about the water cycle. My teacher taught us a song that had hand and arm movements to go along with it. I can still remember the song and it’s movements to this day, and I know most of us did very well on the water cycle test when she gave it to us.  Just last week in my social studies class I found information on how to celebrate Chinese New Year in the classroom. One lesson I planned was to have my students make their own dragon masks with streamers and a handle attached to the mask. Once they were done with their masks I would turn on traditional Chinese music and have them free style their own dragon dance to the music. After reading about the different domains, I found this type of exercise would fall under the psychomotor domain and it would be the visual culture approach as well. Students will love this type of activity because it is considered art, they will be able to move, and they will also learn about a different culture.
Math is a subject that I have struggled with and have never had much fun while doing it, but in chapter nine of the textbook I read different ways that I can bring art into my math lessons. I hope that this will help my students who may have a hard time with math actually enjoy it, and understand it better. I might have a different attitude towards math if my teachers would have integrated art and other subjects into their lessons. This is a way to integrate the affective domain. If art changes my students’ attitudes and feelings towards a subject I want to bring it into my lessons as much as possible. 

Resources:



Watkins, G. Integrating arts into the classroom [Web log message]. Retrieved from http://gingersnapstreatsforteachers.blogspot.com/2010/01/integrating-arts-into-classroom-this-is.html



Clements, R, & Wachowiak, F. (2010). Art a qualitative art program for elementary and middle schools. Boston: Pearson.(chapter 7,page 84), (chapter 8, page 103), (Chapter 9, p 119), (chapter 6, pg 70-72).

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