Week 7

Incorporating art into classrooms especially in the early years is so important. It allows for students to be creative, hands on, and express themselves. To incorporate art and artists into my future classroom, I will allow students to draw based off of stories they have read and maybe test their comprehension by letting them draw what happened in the story. Another way art can be incorporated is letting students draw pictures to show that they understand what vocabulary words mean. You can also let them draw with given instructions with room for them to be creative while also thinking critically. 

For my parody artwork I choose the American Gothic painting by Grant wood. I had seen this painting many times before and for some reason out of all the paintings I looked at this one gave me the most ideas of how I could make a parody out of it. I decided to instead of drawing people, to draw penguins and give it more of a winter atmosphere instead of maybe a summer or fall atmosphere. I have always loved penguins and I know children usually do too so I found this idea fun and kind of silly too. I am honestly not sure why this idea came to my mind, but I decided to roll with it. So far, I started by drawing the house regularly, and then drew the penguins instead of the people but in a similar position to the man and the woman. On Monday, I plan on painting or coloring the picture to give it color, but to also incorporate the winter theme, because obviously penguins live in the cold and it will give the artwork more of a difference. 

I believe I could incorporate the activities from this week into my future classroom. On Monday whenever we researched an artist, I believe you can incorporate this with children, but instead of researching an artist, I could have my students pick a piece of artwork and talk about what they see in it, what they like about it, and what they may change about it. For Wednesday’s class with the parody art, I think this would be a fun way to explore children’s imaginations as well as creativity. I think to make it easier for children, the artwork chosen would probably have to be less detailed, but I think this activity could be great and fun for children!

As for me, the activities this week were a little bit outside of my comfort zone. For me artwork and artists aren’t really something I am super interested in. I am not going to lie, having to recreate a painting kind of made me sigh a little bit as painting and drawing has never been my thing. On Thursday, there were times I was very frustrated that my artwork wasn’t working out or looking good enough for me. However, I understand why artwork is important to learn in the classroom so I had the motivation to try my best!