Sequence and Organization of the Unit:Topic Taught:
We talked all about architecture! We started off by talking about the parts of a building and moved towards the parts of a city. The students were learning in their daily classroom all about government and the city around us (Fort Collins), and how it works. We figured that we could integrate our teachings in with what they're being exposed to already and then expand on it. We used many mediums to create one large project. Our focus was about translating our ideas from 2-Dimensions to 3-Dimensions as well as revision. Lesson One: My Dream Home In lesson one, we talked about what artists do, what they make, and why they make it. So we began where many artists begin: sketches. We sketched our dream home. This is where we started asking the important questions about why we make things by asking ourselves. So why did they make the house they did? Where is it? Why did you add the elements you did? Lesson Two: Planning like an Architect In this lesson, we talked about creating multiple drafts and about how the first run of things may not be the best. We did this through monoprinting. We would make a fresh new draft of our homes on a piece of plexiglas and then attempt to improve on it or in some way make it different in our future prints, considering a monoprint allows only one copy of that print. Lesson Three: Architects Build This was our lengthiest lesson. We did a lot of refinement, but mainly focused on turning our homes into a reality through use of 3-Dimensional materials. It was most time intensive because this was the actual building portion which includes the home from clay, painting the home, the environment of the home (paint and found objects) and revision plays into this as well. Some of our sketches didn't have many things going on around the home, so we decided to talk about stories and creating the narrative of what goes on in our dream homes. From there manifested many more ideas of what to add into our new buildings. Lesson Four: Let's Build a City In our final lesson, we added in the element of collaboration. Now that we have our dream home, we must create our "Dream city" so to speak. In this lesson, the students learned about what goes into a city, what makes a city run, what types of buildings need to be there, and then they created those things as a team. From there, we created a blueprint of an entire town, and formatted our homes in a way that would make everyone excited to live there if it were real life. |
Methods for Integrating Literacy, Numeracy, Technology, and Other Relevant Subjects:Literacy was used in a couple of ways in the classroom. The most prominent would be the labelling of their work. When they were making their homes or blue prints, they were encouraged to label just like a real blue print would. This helped us understand what they had in mind for their project and it also seemed to help them organize their thoughts and to really think about how they were planning and why.
Numeracy was used in lesson two where we had them create monoprints. This was our way of making planning and revision fun for them. They took their original ideas and would branch off each time into new and exciting ideas - revised from the previous attempts! This is important for their daily lives in understanding that a first attempt may not be the best one and that there is always room for improvement, even when you are the critic. Technology was incorporated through us as the teachers use of it mostly through power points and documentation. However, they did get to use new tools in clay that wasn't familiar to them like the extruder or a rib. |
Strategies for Classroom Management Relevant to Lesson Taught in the Unit: In the beginning of each lesson, Brittany, their all day teacher, would set the tone in showing the series of event that would occur throughout the day. After she was finished, she would send them our way to art class. We made sure to get them in the mindset by trying to push the idea that they are an architect now and even had them "put on their architect hard hats" whenever we needed them to focus on what was planned for the day. We spoke to them as such as well, and would ask about their plans for their homes as if they were really going to build them.
We made sure that they stayed in their "collaborative groups" set up by their homeroom teacher, Brittany. This way we could be sure that they were in a familiar area to work as well as be confident in the idea that their homeroom teacher knew who worked well with whom. Throughout class we would use a "call and respond" technique in case anything was getting out of hand such as: not listening to the speaker, needing to get their attention mid-work, having to refocus, or just to get the volume level down. We would sing "Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?" and they would respond with "Spongebob Squarepants!" And they were expected to remain silent after that. If they weren't I would continue to the next part in the theme song. If they were still not silent after that, I would be sure to ask them about respect. There would be questions like "how do we respect whoever is speaking, whether it's me, or another classmate?" and then the students with hands raised would respond and I would thank them for being respectful in raising their hands as well as answering my question. At the end of class we would ALWAYS assign clean up. The first day we were loose about it, but figured real quick that we needed a system. We would do a call and respond, then assign one person at each table with a duty and ask that anyone who finishes their duty helps to pick up the floor in the whole classroom and to help out their peers. |
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