First Day of Class

While the specifics of what and who I will be teaching on the first day are yet to be determined, I know that I want the students to get right into doing something with their hands. I want the bulk of class time on the first day to be something light-hearted and fun for students to create, and afterwards we will talk about the structure of the class.

For my first day of class assignment I chose to have the students come in, look at the slide projected telling half of them to draw a partner's name from the bowl in the middle of the room. They then had to find and meet that person, and then make a paper airplane and decorate it with any art supplies they could find in the room. This familiarizes them with the layout of the classroom and lets them know that it is all theirs to access. They had the length of one song to complete their planes. After a short teacher intro so I'm not a stranger to them, we came together and talked about how different their planes looked from one another, and related it to some of the curriculum we will cover in class. Above all though, an emphasis on fun, student-innovated art should be the main take away. We then have a short discussion on what it means to be an artist, ending with the fact that they all are artists.

Link to slideshow: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12aR3qdwnyCM_RjhzYBpYQUhDQEgI9nzhLuKFmll_C68/edit?usp=sharing