Job Fair

Today I attended a job fair, which is a professional reason not to be student teaching. The break was definitely nice and needed, as I started coming down with a stuffy nose yesterday. Last evening I spent about 5 hours updating and reformatting my resume. When I finished my revisions I was most surprised by the amount of experiences I have had in teaching. I expanded my resume for the first time to two pages just to fit about the wonderful things I have done in the last three years. It looks fantastic! I interviewed with several schools today. Several of them stated that they liked some sort of visual detail about the resume. One of them stated right away that he wanted the principal to look at it and then wrote the guys name on top. While this particular job does not appeal to me 100%, it is only 45 minutes away and in my field. With this economy, something is better than nothing. Since I don't want to relocate this may be the direction I go. But we will see at a later date.

Emotional Face Collage, critique

I absolutely love the results of the second grader's Emotional Face Collage project and think they all should be really proud. So today I led a critique. I started by explaining what a critique was, using a reference to the food critique in the cartoon Ratatouille. I had each student take turns coming up to the display of face collages and stand under their favorite collage. They could not select an image that had already been talked about or their own. One sweet little boy said that they were all his favorite. So cute!

The critique was perhaps a little long winded. Shauna suggested for the last group that I try just having the students talk about 5 pieces from the other classes. I will ask them to identify the emotion and look for how the artist had expressed the emotion through color and hair. Below are some of the final pieces the students had completed.

2nd graders complete their Emotional Face Collage

Today I updated the display outside of the art room with some of the completed Emotional Face Collages that my 2nd graders have been working on. My group today were completing their collages, so they will be doing their critique next session. Once my two final groups do critique I will add more to this display. Before class I organized all the materials for each of the table groups. I had paper from them to cut from, any uncompleted collages, new materials so that everyone would do at least one collage today, and a place where all the completed work was hanging from. I even rearranged some of the students to eliminate some of the talking that was happening last time, particularly from two boys who are BFF. They still were out of their seats getting up to be next to one another, but this will need to get eliminated over the next couple classes. I took some pictures today of the 2nd graders working on their collage. Many of the students had all their collage pieces cut out and ready to glue. This student is working on her second collage and is gluing her pieces onto the blue paper. At the end of class I concluded with having the students complete a self-assessment worksheet. They had to define what emotion they had been working on, if they were creative, if they worked quietly and paid attention, and so forth. Next time this group will do their critique and probably start their next project in that time.

ISAT and the Art Room

Last Thursday it came to Mrs. Carey and my attention that our schedule will be changing today through Wednesday due to ISATs. It hasn't been a big mystery in the school that the ISATs would be happening, and we were doing our part in helping get the students ready through the art environment. We've set timers saying that they cannot talk or get help during the 10/15 minutes that the alarm was set. We did some Smartboard activities that included fill-in-the-dot questions that tested the students' knowledge on topics recently explored through the project they completed and video the students watched. With all this preparation why was it only two days before the tests did we learn of the change in our schedule?
If you've kept yourself updated on the past several months of postings, than you would know that the 3rd grade general classroom is nuts. Last week they had 1 substitute leave halfway through the day, and another one saying that her first stop after leaving the building was a liquor store (which she stated before this comment that this was not her regular behavior). Apparently last week one of these students had attempted to strangle another one of the students. The principal was meeting with several of the parents/guardian of these students. When one of them said that her own nephew needed to be suspended for his actions the principal said that "she had not decided yet". mhmm.... Personally, and I don't believe there is any room for argument on the issue, when physical violence e nters into the equation actions must be swift and powerful.
Since the third graders are under a bunch of stress with tests , and having to really be on their best behavior in order to concentrate for their ISATs, we are doing a 1-day pop-up project with them.

We showed them different types of pop-ups that they can do – from layer pop-ups to mouth pop-ups; the castle above is the example I made for them to see, plus the house was done by one of the students.