Romare Bearden

I really enjoyed my time on Bearden's web site. I was fascinated that his creation is as big as a school bus in reality! It is always interested to me to hear about, and in this case visualize, the life of another person. The best part of the design for me was that the windows were open to see what the people were doing inside. With the creation of the web site I was able to zoom in and really get a sense of Bearden's world.

Another part of the web site I really enjoyed was the "things to do" category. It had great games for younger kids familiarizing them with the picture and what is taking place. It also had great ideas for adults and extension activities for using this in the classroom. I could design a whole lesson around the "Imaginative Words" section where students listen to the passage first.
The site gave me some great ideas and opened my mind to how important it is to allow students to express their personal lives in ways that are meaningful to them.

Graphic Novels

I really liked the idea of bringing graphic novels into the classroom and I understand the benefits they can have in the classroom. One idea I never thought of is that it allows the students to view and understand the material at their own pace. As Yang said it doesn't matter how fast I can talk because students can read it at any speed they want. When you are considering the wide range of student ability levels and learning styles in one classroom, the graphic novel would be a great differentiation tool to use.

Personally, I would find using the graphic novel hard. First off, I am a perfectionists and do not consider myself a good drawer. Therefore, to complete one lecture with a graphic novel would take me forever. Unfortunately, I do not like to draw, I only find it challenging and frustrating because my pictures never come out to look how I planned. Also, I am not a big reader of comics. I think, as unfortunate as it is, teachers often teach to the learning styles that work best for them while only incorporating the others every once in a while when they happen to think about it. Creating graphic novels would be something I would really have to think about and challenge myself to use in the classroom a lot of the time.

Further down in the article they show examples of already created graphic novels. That is something I would be much more likely to use in my classroom and I think would be much easier for the students to understand than my own personal drawings.

Islamic Art

In the article Islamic Art and Geometric design I really liked their ideas on how you can teach geometric shapes across content by bringing in science and social studies to what seems like a simple math concept. One thing I was concerned about after reading the article was the practice of separating of church and state. I had a parent teacher conference experience during our student teaching simulation where a parent was angry about a passage in a book that he felt went against his religion. I can only imagine where parents might go when I explain to students about Islam when they ask me where these shapes and ideas on drawing came from.

With the second article, Islamic Art as an Educational Tool, I again was flooded with ideas on how the many ideas of how one could tie art into a social studies lesson. Also after reading the second article I am re-thinking my previous notion about teaching about Islam. I am realizing my own naive thinking and seeing there are many more aspects that go into teaching about Islamic art than the religion. I think it would take a lot of thinking and planning but I am feeling more comfortable after reading more about Islamic Art that I could use it in my classroom as a tool for the future.

How Art is Made

While I was reading through this article about how children learn art I could not help but relate things that I have learned about being in the classroom to things I am now learning about art. Through methods courses we are always talking about ways students learn aside from the typical instructional strategies. Little things that teachers do, maybe not even intentionally that students pick up on. One thing that came to my mind while reading this article was that most teachers preface any drawing they do in front of the classroom with "I'm a terrible drawer but..." and then everyone laughs after the drawing is complete no matter what it looks like.

Teachers need to be modeling for students the idea that drawing is a part of a person, you do not need have amazing skills and create a Mona Lisa to be respected as an artists. Some how the idea of every student needing to color in the lines, every student needing to make grass green and apples red has created a sigma that makes someone either good or bad at art. Teachers feed off that sigma when they stand at the board in front of the entire class and allow everyone to make fun of their drawings because they do not look exactly like the trees that grow outside or the car that drives down the street.