Observation- March 16th

This morning I observed my cooperating teacher teach a lesson on art history and she went through every period leading up to post-modernism.  This was an introduction to the next project where students would be painting a subject of choice.  She had the students gather images of paintings, in which she pulled the images up on the SmartBoard and had a discussion about why they were a successful painting and had them identify what period they belonged to.  The next hour of class students were still working on their landscape paintings.  I noticed that there was such a wide variety of skill and artistic talent.  Some students really grasped the concept of color theory and created atmospheric perspective successfully, while others struggled to shy away from an elementary-looking landscape! 
In the ceramics class I observed Mrs. C demonstrated how to load the kiln, and she also showed two students from the class who had finished early with their projects.  At first the students made the mistake of loading the kiln with larger pieces towards the bottom.  Mrs. C corrected this issue by reloading it with small pieces on the bottom and the largest pieces on the top.  This saves on space and the kiln holds the most pieces at a time by loading it this way.  Its important to fit as many pieces as possible into each firing because of budgets.  Its not cheap to run the kiln each time.
During my cooperating teacher's prep hour she gave me a rundown on how her online grading system works, and then let me grade the color theory projects I had taught and enter them into the grade book.  For the color wheel and each color theory study points were awarded for each swatch they were responsible for painting.  For example, the value study required seven swatches of distinguishable value change and if a student displayed a full scale of value they were awarded all seven points.  If they showed me less than seven swatches they were deducted points.  It wasn't a very complicated project to grade, as it was pretty straightforward, but it was still great practice and experience for me!