Final Week: This post was fueled by 2nd grade Robots

Well folks we finally made it. I made it... I dare say I may have even succeeded! It's bittersweet to end something as exciting as student teaching - I felt like I could have done more for the students and schools but I was also ready to get all graduated! This week was spirit week for the holidays and Monday was "ugly sweater day" Uhhh... I didn't have an ugly one so I wore my awesome one instead?!

Monday: At the high school ceramics students were working on their new project, Slab vase/sculptures. They were creating and cutting down slabs using their paper templates to create walls and structure. I did a similar project in college with less than great results.. maybe something to try again in the future!

Drawing students were beginning to add their alterations to their environments and incorporate details. We talked a lot about placement of objects and figures and the next steps in the project. Students were really working hard on these and seemed excited about the results - the mark of a well-planned and paced lesson, I think :)

My 7th graders were cutting up tissue paper, tracing stencils, chatting chatting chatting, and some of them were really picking up speed on their ceramic bells. I had to catch up to them! Mine was going to be a snake with pattern work on the bell surface and lots of different textures on the snake itself. I like it - but I'm one of those weird people who likes snakes.

At the elementary school it was a bittersweet day.... my entire schedule for the rest of my student teaching was laid out in front of me.. I was excited to try out some new lessons but I was also sad that I wasn't going to see these kiddos anymore. It felt surreal penning down these last few days and organizing the lesson plans for what few classes I would work with. Mr. Keller and I were working on planning lessons that could be continued when I left or finished by Wednesday. I was beginning to feel a pang of jealousy... I wanted to keep working with the kids! I wanted to see how they would progress for the rest of the year and how their art would grow and change and develop.. I guess that's the price I pay for student teaching to the middle of the year - you leave with a sense of longing.

My task for the day at the elementary school was to work with the 6th graders on finishing their weaving projects. It was sad - they all knew it was my last week and were going the extra mile to spend time in the classroom with me. They did their best to be productive and even made me some going away 'presents'. They made some cards and braids and other little trinkets with yarn and I got lots of hugs and warm thanks. I have been putting my little gifts from students into a binder that I'm gonna refer to when the going gets rough.. like with a long day in 1st grade art or a mean comment from a parent or just a stressful time in general. I have looked at it a lot since graduation - and I have been gathering mementos and pieces from students and campers over the years for my feel-good binder. It means a lot to me to have that running timeline of good things.

Tuesday was exciting! One of my advanced students was finishing up sculpting his totally freaking awesome Darth Vader helmet... and modeling it, of course. He constructed everything by hand! He only used one mold to shape the dome of the helmet and everything else was hand built and carved and added and I was just so proud to see something like that on the firing shelf. Score 1000 for the nerds!!

Some of the ceramics students were also getting their hands dirty and finishing up twisted vessels of various sizes, shapes, patterns, and textures. It was fun to see them pushing the expectations of the assignment and starting to go "outside the box" for inspiration and expression. I really like the open-mindedness of this project. Every single student was working on something different and unique to them.

I snagged a photo of my 7th graders in a rare moment of not-talking and not-sassing! No but really, I learned a LOT teaching these kids. I am grateful for all the experiences they gave me in managing the classroom, pacing my lessons, and being patient with personalities. I still see some of them from time to time in passing or when hanging out with friends - it's all small towns up here! I was really proud of the work they accomplished and the risks they were taking with their art.

no sass pictured

Link! Stained glass! More nerdiness!

I took some time after Art survey ended to snap even MORE pictures of the advanced students' work. I have plans to do a post about my advanced students' individual projects as the semester carried through. It just got more and more impressive as time went on and they never stopped showing up ready to work.

a pretty little chickadee painting

a GIANT truck painting
some military portraits
musician portraits
football painting

huge giant huge wall mural-size painting of Native American dancers :)

At the elementary school I was working with 5th grade on 'color wheel paintings'. We were mixing colors and basically getting right down to business with making art! Students were having a good time making imaginative landscapes and creatures and creations with their palettes. I did find myself having to reinforce expectations quite a bit to keep the kids on task, but once they were painting they were pretty focused in on their work. This class, as with many others, has a lot of active personalities and quirks and I had to rearrange some seats to prevent issues, but I don't see that changing for this group for a long time anyway. With elementary school students sometimes it's better to prevent the problem from ever happening by some quick maneuvering of the seating arrangement.

not the prettiest painting ever but this student was really pleased with the colors he made
he said it looked like a stormy sky :)

This student always does super cool destructive art.
I encouraged it in all its forms, within reason.. no blood was allowed in his artwork. 

just a fun little color experimentation - I got to keep this one - it had my name written on it

My favorite from the bunch - same student as the first painting
I really love the movement and energy in this abstract work :)

"Ms. Kanak! I made pastels!"

color exploration of the concept of our "rainbow paintings"

Wednesday ... the final countdown to the end of student teaching. My face definitely shows some weariness on my final morning as Ms. Kanak, secondary art teacher at Wabeno. But I got lots of extra rest and prep in for this day - and tried to leave my heavy heart behind. I knew I was going to the school where I would be surrounded by art and awesome students and staff and support from all sides. I could be sad that I was gonna leave... or I could be really really happy I did the best I could and learned a lot and I was going to see family and graduate and and and. Aka... the positives outweighed the negatives by FAR.

reluctant to finish this quest...

Wednesday was a block day so Mr. Keller had his ceramics students double-time. I went down to the elementary school to do - what else!? - lesson planning! Mr. Keller had asked if I wanted to take over the 2nd grade lesson for the day - painting a close-up snowman. I jumped at the chance to put a Ms. Kanak spin on a painting project! We were going to paint robots. I will post the lesson plan later but for now I can do a quick run-through of process ;)

The main goal of this lesson was to teach students how to paint tints and shades. The up close snowman lesson focused on tints and shades of blue... so I worked with that as a framework for planning. I started to brainstorm about other 'blue' things... me, being the weirdorama that I am, I thought of robots. Soooo the first step was to learn about tints and shades. These students had already learned mixing colors and reviewed primaries and the color wheel. This was a simple math problem for each color made! If you wanted a tint of blue, you started with white and added blue. If you wanted a shade of blue you started with black and added blue.. you get the idea. The possibilities were really high for success and I experimented a lot with amounts of the hue + black/white.

The next step was to draw! 2nd grade does everything big so I used a big crayon to draw my shapes. I put together a presentation about different basic shapes we could combine to make the different components of the robot. I used as many as I thought would make my robot look good and functional.  I wanted students to make arms and legs of some kind and to leave enough space for the details, which would be added later... on that note, I will save the rest til we can see the students' work!

When I went back to the high school I made sure to snap some pictures of the in-progress drawings by the drawing students. They were really starting to understand the rules of perspective and placement of people and things! I was proud of them for taking on such a big challenge - they were doing a really good job.

woodland scene

fantasy goth environment..thingy

a campfire outside the library?!

a beach oasis in the hallway ;)

The 7th graders were working on their ceramic animal bells and man oh MAN did they work fast! Here's one next to my teacher's sample - I don't really know what mine is.. some kind of punk rock squid thing? Anyway, we talked about slipping and scoring with my ugly bell creature and I gave students the opportunity to add onto mine as they saw fit.

dog/cat bell and ugly squid Ms. Kanak monstrosity thing

these were fun - a blob fish and a panda!

One thing I noticed as students started working on their bells more was the ability level. Mr. Keller had been building up their knowledge of clay since 1st grade so they had a lot of years on me! I was impressed with their problem solving. Very rarely did I have to show a student step by step how to attach an appendage or detail. They were very familiar with the tools to use for certain techniques or textures, and they were happy to show me how they were accomplishing different parts of their projects.

a penguin and the start of a bear

a very inquisitive owl and a snake!

penguin

The student who made the penguin was really.. really really really trying to rush through this project. Every time she did something else to it she declared it finished.... until Ms. Kanak came over by it and offered polite suggestions and ideas. I think she restructured her bell a handful of times before being altogether happy with it, and even then she would question its completion and detail work. She really liked the texture of the feathers - and I did too! It was quite the uphill battle to get to this point, though. The only thing harder than students who don't want to work is students who race to the finish.

I really really liked this snake bell -
I thought the texture was great and loved the expressive eyes

Kind words from a kind Kaleb

This student... his work was not so great. Not as great as it could have been - by far. He was easily distracted, didn't really listen to the directions for the project, his focus waned and wandered, he was sitting with some really disruptive classmates... I could go on but the point of this story is he really tried. He tried very hard to make sense of this project and I felt like I failed him. Multiple times. I worked with him on planning his stained glass designs, drew pictures with him, guided him to finding reference images, and still he was displeased with his project and confused about the process. I looked at his project multiple times and sat with it for prep periods and really turned things over in my head; what could I have done?

I could have moved him from that table with the disruptive classmates.
I could have explained the project to him one-on-one one more time.
I could have done the project for him.
 No. No no. This is something I will not and would not do. This is something that some students come to expect. When you give up on their ability to accomplish the task or solve the problem, they look to you for the solution and the shiny result. They want you to do it for them - to make the sense without their participation. It is something I refuse to do and something I disliked about previous teachers I had in my art classes - don't do it for me; teach me how to do it so I understand. Don't let me lean on the teacher for the grade - I will only learn to be helpless. And time and time again Kaleb would tell me he understood when he just... didn't. He turned to his neighbor who was also struggling with the project and took his lead - and did the opposite of what I asked and what the project called for. The big teachable moment for myself here was that I want to be able to reach all of my students with my learning objectives and give them clear sight of what problem they need to tackle. I know it will be difficult to talk to every student and check in, but that's the beauty of having a smaller class size, and it also highlights the major way I failed Kaleb in my instruction. Lesson learned: take my time to explain my objectives and do not assume everyone is on the same page, in the same book, in the same library.

Some kids just need that extra minute or two where they can feel safe to ask what they need to ask.

I was really proud of this student for staying on task and finishing his window
he never shut up
ever

Okay, so I promised robots and we will get to that! First we have to talk about 1st grade :)  First graders were painting "changes in the weather" and they got to look at some really cool paintings of weather from different movements in art history and by different artists. It was a really cool way to get these kids thinking about how they could depict weather in their art. After that we practiced painting zig zags (for lightning), clouds, patterns of lines to make rain drops, swirly lines for wind, and in addition to all that we also looked at tints and shades! It's a big time lesson for big time artists - these kids did not disappoint.  We first mixed tints and shades with our blue paint and students quickly realized they could use their red and yellow to make orange aaaand that they could make tints and shades with the mixed colors too! I had a lot of fun wandering around the classroom and watching their minds work.. though there were some behavioral hangups. This is a rough class for noisy kiddos. I had one student yelling directions and yelling at me and yelling at his peers. I had another student who just could not sit still and wanted to be part of all of the former students' misbehaviors. I had another student who really just wanted to paint sharks. He always wants to paint and draw and make sharks - cool.. but not weather. I managed to get him to paint a bit of sky over his very menacing shark picture but he really struggled with that. He was also not following directions during demonstration and was poking at and moving the paints. This class got a lot of reminders about procedures and expectations in the art room and with painting. However, as you can see, they did paint some pretty great pictures of weather and were happy with their results.

And now.. the robots. So we left off with painting the bodies of the robots with our tints and shades. As this teacher could not have predicted, I was sassed by a bunch of 2nd graders about how robots are not blue, they're grey, Ms. Kanak! Well.. fine. Fine. Fiiiinnnneeeee. We improvise and we adapt and we move on. A lot of the kiddies decided after learning about tints and shades that they wanted grey robots instead of blue ones. So we had lots of different colored robots!

The real fun happened when I told the students how we were going to make our buttons and components and details.. I had found some q-tips in one of the cabinets when I was painting my own robot and thought... hey. This is a new way to apply paint! Let's make buttons! So I had robots with lots of buttons.. in snow.. and rain.. and I think lightning storms.. and with pink flowers. The kids really liked this lesson and I had a minimal amount of behavioral problems. Students were showing me their robot families and 'teams' and all other sorts of fun creations. I was pretty proud of them for taking on the challenge of making original drawings, too! Sometimes I was sure all these students knew how to do was copy from a picture of something else - how wrong Ms. Kanak was in this assumption. Their robots were lively and colorful and fun! I heard all about what they did for work and where they went to school. It was overwhelmingly cute.

The ones on the right are some of my favorites - so complex and different they all are! The one with the black and grey arm and the yellow lights.. too cool. I would definitely do this lesson again.

And just like that.. student teaching was over! I had to pack up my things and load them into my truck for the drive back home to the farm. I had to clear out my desk(s) and return everything to normal for Mr. Keller and the students. I had gathered so many memories and experiences and I didn't want to be done... but If I am being completely honest.. I was a little relieved. I was excited to consider the possibilities of my own future classroom(s) and students. I was ready to take on all the things! Teaching and otherwise! I still feel that way - though I will leave my final reflection for my next post because it's getting late and my eyeballs and fingers are tired from all my typing! This is what happens when life and time and fun gets in the way of working - you have to play catch up! If only I had super awesome 2nd grade robots to help me out in my blogging...

to be continued...

Ms. Kanak - signing off until her back is properly rubbed from marathon typing in a wooden chair.