Lesson 2: Fantasy World Worksheet and Watercolor Techniques

For the second lesson of this class I decided to create a type of worksheet that would help the students understand the concept of a fantasy world better to go along with the art lesson that I had. So in the beginning of class I handed out the worksheets that gave examples fantasy worlds such as: Candy Land, Outer Space, Under Water, etc. and prompted them to either pick one of the examples or create one themselves. The questions following this were all related to specific details of their fantasy world such as “draw a picture of the people or creatures in your fantasy world”, “draw the type of trees and plants you would have in your fantasy world”, “draw the types of buildings and homes you would have in your fantasy world”, etc. When I was watching the students fill out the worksheet it was still obvious that the younger students were struggling with it and so I would read them each question and give them examples, which did help but their attention span seemed to be very short even though we only worked on the worksheet for about 15-20 minutes of class time. Once the older students had finished their worksheets I told the rest of the class to wrap up on whatever question they were on and we could continue working on it later. Afterwards I moved onto the actual art lesson, which was showing the students different watercolor techniques. I gave a demonstration of how you can use salt, oil pastels, crayons, colored pencils, chalk pastels, and plastic wrap to create different effects when using watercolors. I then told the students that I wanted them to paint an image of what the sky in their fantasy world would look like and encouraged them to be creative and take advantage of the different techniques. As I was walking around the students seemed to be having a lot of fun using all the different techniques, and I noticed that if one student started using a certain tool then they all then wanted to try it. Therefore the salt was really popular throughout the whole class and several students experimented more with the oil and chalk pastels, however towards the end more students wanted to try the plastic wrap. All in all I think the students really did enjoy learning this technique, however they did finish a bit earlier than I had expected. For the ones that finished early I encouraged them to create more detail in their piece and that did work for some. About 15 minutes before class ended all the students had pretty much finished their paintings and they insisted they didn’t want to embellish on it anymore. After this I tried to get some of the students who didn’t finish working on their worksheet to finish it but they were all becoming very antsy and were not able to focus. I think the main issue I am having with getting the younger students to listen to me is that they are all very close friends and when one of them decides to rebel the rest follow. Therefore for my next class I am going to come up with more collaborative art games, such as exquisite corpse, and alter my lessons to make them more collaborative so that the students will be able to play with one another more during class. My final thoughts after this lesson was that I still have a lot to learn about teaching art to younger students, however my class is doing a great job at helping learn how to teach them better and I definitely saw an improvement since last time!