Standard 2: Learner and Enviornment
 

 Overview

The focus of Standard two is considering the diversity of students and their learning styles in the classroom while ensuring a learner-

centered environment that encourages collaboration.

Relevant Description

In order to meet Standard Two's goals of considering  diversity of student learning styles and ensuring collaboration and learner centeredness, I designed my lesson plan "Friends of Hercules" with differentiated instruction, authentic interdisiplinary and extracuricular connections, and collaborative group work. I accomodated various learning styles through teaching strategies such as summarizing and notaking, visual presentations, and realizing ideas in both two dimentional and three dimentional materials.

Content Area Standards

Essential Questions-

• What are some examples of mythical, fantasy creatures from Greek mythology and from current popular culture?
• How can these creatures be appropriated to make something unique?
• How do many of these creatures combine elements from several animals be more terrifying or interesting?
• How does art reflect culture?

During my placement at East Dale Elementary School, I developed a lesson that focused on Greek Mythology: “The Friends of Hercules” In this lesson, students learned about the history and characteristics of fantastic creatures from Greek Mythology, how many characters in current popular movies, books, and video games appropriate these creatures, and how they can make design their own and make them into clay sculptures.

Day One

To introduce the lesson, I showed the students a brief clip from the Disney movie “Hercules”, followed by a Power Point presentation that named and described the creatures from Greek Mythology they had seen in the clip. I then explained to the students that they would be learning about these characters and would design their own fantasy character to create out of clay.

Each table (about four students at each) were given an information sheet about a particular creature from Greek mythology. Students worked together as a group to write notes from the info sheet and summarize the main characteristics of the creature on the mini white boards.(see artifact two) They then took turns presenting their creature to the rest of the class.

I pointed out how many creatures from Greek mythology combine the most striking elements of two animals to make a more powerful creature. I will explained that multiple examples of this can be found in the popular culture that surrounds us today, and that they can use those examples, and those from ancient myths, as ideas for their own creatures they will make.

To share ideas, students shared their favorite examples of fantasy creatures from movies, books, and video games while I list them on the white board for them to reference while they were brainstorming.

Students made rough sketches of their creatures combining two animals. They were required to have at least one finished sketch before beginning in clay( see attachment) . I also encouraged them to bring images to use for references.

Day Two-Three

On the second day of the lesson, Students used their references and sketches to begin working on building their clay mythical creatures. Using a teacher example, I discussed elements such as contrast and texture that they should use. I asked for at least two textures in their sculpture. I will also discussed proper clay techniques such as scoring and slipping and avoiding fragile add-ons.

After the sculptures were fired, they were painted with acrylic paint. Students took time at the end of the lesson to write a paragraph describing their creature, their inspiration for it, and any special powers it might have.a unit on cartoon drawing. Maybe a rubric would have helped them to understand that I was introducing a new style and technique.

(Student Work)

           

Reflection

I chose the theme Greek mythology for the sculpture lesson because I recognized its potential to uphold the reseach based strategy of "thematic instruction". The students were able to make connections between popular culture ( Disney's Hercules, Harry Potter and many others) with ancient myths; between the art of character design and story telling. The Disney Hercules video clip was a very effective attention getting device for the lesson, and the students also enjoyed sharing examples they remembered from recent movies, books, and video games with mythological creatures based on Greek mythology (Cerbuis and Griffin in Harry Potter, sirens in Pirates of the Caribbean) Sometimes it was a little challenging to contain their excitement! Since research strongly supports the instuctional strategy of  "summarizing and note taking", I took the opprotunity to incorporate it into the lesson. According to researchers: "Effective summarizing leads to an increase in student learning. Helping students recognize how information is structured will help them summarize what they read or hear. "(Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001). I believe this strategy worked well for this lesson because the students seemed to retain the information.

Plans for Improvement

I was pleasantly surprised by how excited the students were to work in groups. They did a very good job of sharing the work, and taking turns, and there was almost no conflict. However, I could have improved the group work by giving the groups specific tasks to delegate, such as reader, note taker, speaker, ect. I also could have included larger images for the students presenting to show to the class, since many of the students were very interested in seeing the small thumbnail image on the information sheet. I could also have done more to ensure vocabulary retention through vocabulary definitions sheet and a short game.

In the future, I will continue to use grade appropriate and relevant video clips as attention getting devices. The Power Point I showed after the video seemed to be effective too, but I know it is important to limit the directive style teaching, especially with younger students. I will take that into consideration and try to incorporate more interactive introductions. To improve this, I am seeking ideas from my host teacher and online resources. In my performance as a teacher, I could improve by keeping an outline of the lesson at hand so I can be sure to use the vocabulary, essential questions, and strategies that I planned.