Read and React Week 11

Chapter Five:  Learning To Develop Craft
This chapter discusses many classroom situations and experiences.  Students need to understand how to use and care for all the materials they use in the art classroom.  Teachers should show students how to correctly use the materials and then they should be allowed to explore the media and develop a personal technique.  This process may happen over a few years, a student will not immediately develop a personal style until later in high school unless this student is exceptional.  As the text discusses color theory, the rules must be learned before they can be broken.  This is an important part of the basic in art education.  Students learn by watching their teacher demonstrate and learn more by experimenting themselves.  Students need to be given the necessities of the techniques, materials and knowledge before they can be expect to create great art.

Chapter Nine:  Learning to Observe
Students will learn how to see new things while they are in an art classroom.  They will soon learn that grass is not just green and the sky is not just blue.  Using a viewfinder in a classroom is a great way to help students see things in a new way.  This will make the student look more closely at the object and observe the variety of lines, colors, and textures in the object.  Jim's Light and Boxes Project is a great way to teach the students about perspective and how to develop an interesting composition. Students need to learn how to look closely at objects and this will help them in all areas of school when asked to used any type of description in a project (64).

Chapter Four:  Multitasking Madness
Students are constantly multitasking in their lives.  When they sit down to work on homework they may be talking to a handful of friends via text messages or IMs on their computer.  Students usually preform well when in these situations, however it may take them longer to complete the given task when multitasking.  If the students are learning what they need to know and are enjoying the tasks as they complete them then the student is doing well.  Teachers was the students to have fun but do they want them texting, googling....while they are lecturing for the next test?

React:
The two chapters in the "Studio Thinking" text where a nice change of reading material.  I enjoyed reading these two chapters because I saw many techniques that I try as a teacher to incorporate into my classroom.  I found the "Learning to Observe" chapter really interesting because this is something I struggle with in my teaching.  I believe at times I expect my students to see something the way I see it or "how can you not see that ball is as tall as the cup?"  I need to step back and give my students the tools they need to observe things and really see them in different ways. 
Rosen's chapter on multitasking explained what I believe I already new about students.  They are continually doing more than one thing at once and are in constant communication with their peers.  They thrive on multitasking and I believe teachers should take advantage of this technique and incorporate it into the classroom.  As I discussed in my reflection after my 30 minutes of drawing, I never thought about having uni-taskers in my classroom.  I my high school classes we usually have the radio on and many conversations are going and ear buds are in (only one ear).  In my elementary classes we usually have a certain amount of no talking time because our time is so limited and they do complete more when fewer conversations are going on.