Week 9 - Visual Arts

In this week’s art workshop we basically spent some time de-briefing with our fellow students on any art experiences that we might have had during our pracs. As I am doing part time, I didn’t actually go on prac so I was listening intently and very much attempting to live vicariously through others’ experiences. The overall message that seemed to be recurring in many peoples prac experience was that art was very much an afterthought with one teacher letting the kids do whatever they wanted on a Friday afternoon if they had been good, rather than executing an actual art lesson.

We were also asked to bring a one page summary of an art lesson, art resource, or anything that the class might find helpful in relation to art.

My resource was a website, www.kinderart.com.

www.kinderart.com is a fantastic award-winning art education website for parents, teachers and children of all ages which provides free art lesson plans for toddlers to teenagers.

Created in 1997 by Jantje Blokhuis-Mulder and her daughter Andrea Mulder-Slater, the goal of KinderArt is to make art lessons and educational information accessible to people around the world.

In addition to the thousands of free art lesson plans, the website offers printable activity pages, the art kitchen, educational links and articles, early childhood education resources and much more.

What I like about the design of this website is that there are a variety of ways to navigate the site; depending on the type of lesson plan you are seeking to access.

One way you can access art lesson plans is by medium/discipline/theme. These include drawing, sculpture, painting, printmaking, art from anything, multicultural art amongst many other categories.

Another way to access the art lessons is by age and grade. It is particularly helpful that they listed both the grade and what age that grade correlates to as there can be a difference between grades and age in different countries.

One of the most thoughtful and useful categories in the lesson plans by age and grade is a special needs section.

The special needs section contains a great number of art lessons which are appropriate for children and adults with special needs and additionally contains links to other websites and books which deal specifically with providing art experiences for people with special needs.

There are also other categories to explore such as colour mixing, 15 minute fillers and cross curricular art amongst others.

Teachers are encouraged to submit their own lesson plans for addition to the site and there is also a search function, newsletter and shop where you can purchase pre-prepared art packs as well as aprons and other art related paraphernalia.

Overall I feel that this site is a wonderful resource that I will definitely look to use in my future career as a teacher and I hope that everyone else finds it as useful as I have.