Gorham middle school
My first student teaching placement took place at GMS, and my mentor was Amy Cousins. On my first day there Amy had gotten sick so I had to step in and substitute for her. I was incredibly nervous but being in charge of a classroom felt natural for me, and after the first class I started to feel more and more comfortable. I also had a lot of help from the Teacher next door, and Alternative Education Teachers. They would check in on me from time to time which made me feel less alone. I was glad to be able to jump in right away and get to teaching.
Clay Tile Unit
The second lesson I implemented was of my own making, and the medium was clay. The students were making additive relief clay sculptures that retold a fairy tale with a twist. This focused on strengthening students' creative thinking skills, and additive technique in clay. I was really excited about this lesson because it was the first I had written and implemented in a classroom, and I had learned a lot from my last lesson.
Painting Unit
My last lesson at GMS would be on painting. For this lesson, I had two classes that needed to learn color mixing and theory for two separate lessons. My 7th graders needed to know color mixing and theory to paint their clay tiles while my 8th graders would be doing a whole unit on landscape painting. But first, each class needed to know the basics. So I went over primary, secondary, and tertiary colors and how to mix them as well as brush techniques they could implement.
So the first thing I did with the students was a demo on all of these techniques. For the 8th graders, it took two 50-minute classes, and for the 7th graders it took three. They first learned color mixing and analogous colors, then we went over complimentary, shading, and tinting paint. After that I taught them brish techniques they would implement in their paintings, these being glazing, smooth blending, stippling, and the dry brush techniques.
The 8th graders' project was to essentially do a landscape painting. But there were specific perimeters around this. The landscape had to be from a place they had never been to before, and that was outside the U.S. The goal was to expose students to other countries, and cultures. They used Google Earth to find a country and then researched using Google Arts and Culture.
