The Sketchbook Project at General Brock Elementary
Week 1:
On Wednesday, April 24th, and I went into General Brock Elementary to observe the two classes I will be teaching for the next two and a half weeks. I signed in at the office and met Carol Boudreau, a student support worker, who let me into Ms. Parveen Johal’s grade 6/7 classroom. We chatted for a while and I also touched base with Parveen when she got to the classroom. I was informed that the grade 7’s would not be in class that day because they were on a field trip. After the class began, I was prompted to introduce myself to the grade 6 students. The students were immediately friendly and curious about what projects I would be doing with them. I handed the class back over to Parveen, who described a writing activity that the class would be doing. We all went outside and wrote about the sounds we heard, while trying to keep in mind writing with a narrative that would intrigue the reader. We shared some of the writing, and students did some silent reading while Parveen and I discussed my tentative schedule. I then went over to Ms. Leone Payson’s grade 3/4 classroom and met the substitute, Mr. Kevin McPherson, who will be teaching this class for the entirety of my time at Brock. I introduced myself to the grad 3/4 class who were also very friendly. After my introduction, I got immediately pulled over to a table of students who were working on a fraction converting worksheet. I was impressed with how quickly this group of four warmed up to me and wanted to tell me things about the themselves and the school. At lunch, Kevin and I discussed my schedule. I left the first day feeling excited about the teachers and students I would be working with. This day also gave me a clearer idea of the environment in which I would be teaching in for the next two and half weeks.
On Thursday, April 25th, I came into Brock in the AM in order to teach my first lessons of the Sketchbook Project. I was scheduled to teach a 40 minute class in each classroom. I met Parveen’s teaching partner, Ms. Ali Sauder, who was also very friendly and enthusiastic about me doing the project in her class. The grade 6/7’s trickled into the class room and I began my lesson by introducing myself and giving a brief summary of the project. I then asked them to go around the room telling me their name as well and their favourite food and animal (and putting it together in a sentence). For instance, I was Mr. Fabin, the taco tiger. One student was a pomegranate squirrel, and another was a chicken chicken, which got a big laugh. After I got their names, I quickly went over the rules that I had written on a giant paper pad:
- No stick figures please
- Be respectful and positive. No drawings of violence and inappropriate subject matter
- No Worries. It’s OK to make mistakes when we are practicing drawing.
- Drawing=fun! We must have fun!
The rules went smoothly and I felt they were well received and understood. I then handed out the sketchbooks, pencils and gave instructions for our first little project. Students decorated the first page of their sketchbook by writing their names and adding imagery based on their own interests. I did the same introduction lesson with the grade 3/4’s and felt considerable excitement in the room about the workshop. I collected the sketchbooks and glued their cover pages to the front covers with gloss medium after class.
On Friday, April 26th, I started with the the grade 3/4’s for our first full hour lesson (Lesson 1). I was happy to bring back their sketchbooks to hear “ooh’s” and “ah’s.” I planned a lesson that emphasized light contour drawing, drawing 3-d shapes and use of shading. I had students draw a cube, a cylinder and a sphere and I demonstrated how to fill them with simple shading and talked about how adding value gives depth and a sense of realism to our drawings. The grade 3/4’s took to the new skills surprisingly well and were excited about the results of their drawings. I ended the lesson with a demonstration on the chalkboard about how to use the skills we learned to create a robot like character consisting of geometric shapes. Once I drew a basic figure outline, we brainstormed as a class to add details and I drew elements that they suggested. This is when things got fun and silly with their suggestions. It was a great way to end the class and I told them that we will be creating characters of our own next class. I repeated the lesson for the grad 6/7’s and I was pleased to see that they also got into the drawings and especially the demo as they were adding funny random suggestions for me to draw on my demo robot character. The element of silly humour bouncing back and forth with the students is something that I missed while teaching the older students in my secondary practicum. I look forward to teaching my next batch of lessons next week.
Week 2:
Over the weekend I wrote my curriculum for the next 2 week sand decided that I wanted to dig deep with the students and explore the world of figural and character drawing. I chose this because it is a theme that I often gravitate to in my own art and so far, it has been very dominant in my curriculum planing in a secondary setting as well. I also asked the students what types of things they would like to do on the second day and the students who spoke up all mentioned character, portrait and figure drawing.
Lesson 2: After drawing basic 3-d objects and shading in Lesson 1, we put that information to good use by drawing a robot or block character made up of geometric shapes seen from a 3/4 view. The students in both classes got into this and made some great robot characters. I was so impressed with how quickly they took to drawing in the 3-d mind set, and it was hard to believe that some of them had only been drawing within a 2-d mind set before this. The immediate excitement and willingness to draw and explore was a huge shift from teaching grade 10/11/12 just 2 weeks before this. I thought that the feeling of excitement was still present among the grade 8 (which was one of the reasons those classes were my favourite), but I could also see them starting to shift toward a less outwardly enthusiastic approach to creating art. It is not that 10/11/12 aren’t willing and excited to create art, they just don’t generally show it in an obvious outward expression of energy and enthusiasm.
Lesson 3: This lesson got a bit more technical because the goal was to create a proportionate human and create another character. We started with dividing the page into 8 parts that represented the height of a head, we lightly drew in a skeleton, added a body outline, and we added clothes, accessories and other character details at the end. This was more of a challenge, especially for the grade 3/4’s but, again, I noticed that their attitude and energy to persevere was impressive. This feeling of energy and excitement fuels my natural enthusiasm to teach and now matter how many problem/issues/students needing help occurs in the class, I find it is easy to keep up the momentum to move around the room and help. I found some days teaching high school that I would move around with the same pace and eagerness to help, but would often feel apathy or discouragement coming from the students, which in turn affected my energy and momentum. There was also times when I was giving feedback and the reaction from the student made me feel like I was bothering/bugging them. This is nota feeling I get from these primary classrooms. There is a significant sense that the students look up to me as “the teacher” and “the master” almost. When displaying my art examples, there is often the look of awe and amazement in the students faces, which is very different from how high school student react to art demonstrations.
In the 3/4 class, all of these students were completely new to this process, and many found it challenging, but I did not see any student wanting to quit. Several times I heard complaints that they didn’t like their drawing and it was hard, but I reminded them that we are all just learning and practicing and they pushed forward until the end of class. The grade 6/7 found this lesson less challenging in general, but I still noticed a good attitude and excitement to draw learn this new skill. One thing I noticed, was that I drew my demo to look like a basketball player based on their suggestions and more than half the class drew basketball characters. I made me wonder if this was a result of them wanting to copy a prototype or they all love basketball and would have done that direction anyway. I noticed a heavy basketball theme in the block lesson, without my encouragement, but I might have chose a different direction for variety sake if I was to do it again.
Lesson 4: My lesson for this class was to draw more human figures, but this time I prepared a sheet of 2 male and 2 female superhero figures in simple poses. Adding the elements of a pose and trying to do away with the structured hight measurement lines posed a significant challenge for both classes and there was a good amount of questioning, hesitancy and students feverishly erasing pencil lines. I felt that the same attitude of perseverance and positivity permeated the lesson. I had been moving in a steady trajectory of building skills and challenging the students and i felt like we hit the cap on this day. The next lesson was originally going to be another character but shown in 3/4 view like the robot, but I felt like we needed to take a break from the technical rigour and get loose and silly again. I changed my Lesson 5 to my all time favourite drawing game. “the exquisite corpse” and prepared accordingly.
Lesson 5: I headed to the 3/4 class room first as schedule, but was asked by Kevin if we could switch classes because of an unforeseen computer lab conflict. I hurried over to the 6/7 class to see if that was possible and luckily, it was fine with Ali to switch. This is another major difference between teaching primary and secondary in that there is a lot more room for flexibility in the primary setting, which I love. I began the lesson by asking students to draw another character but not to worry about measuring or proportions–I just wanted to them to draw a future version of themselves, which some students took to immediately and drew with purpose and some students only got as far as a outline, claiming they could not think of anything draw about. Meanwhile I called the students up one by one to take portrait pictures in preparation for a 3 lesson long self portrait project next week. After these tasks, I announced that we would be doing a drawing game called “the exquisite corpse,” and I heard audible gasps and “eews” from the grade 6/7’s. One student exclaimed, “are we going to be drawing dead people?” I explained the name and the activity and then an alternate named popped in my head. I said another name for this game is “monster mash-up.” This was better received, so I announced the game to the grade 3/4’s in this way later in the afternoon. This reaction made me think back to when I played the game with my grade 8’s and there was absolutely no audible reaction to the word “corpse” in a class of 30, and they are only a year or so apart in age. I am aware that so much changes between grade 7 and 8, but this is a tiny example. Anyway, the game went very well for both classes and I was glad I made the change to an activity that was more fun, loose and creative.
This was a very fun and productive week of sketchbook workshops. I now feel glad that I pushed to students to embrace new drawing skills and perspectives, and although the challenges were apparent and visible, I got a great positive attitude from the students and I believe they are having a lot of fun. I received a comment form one of the teachers that they were impressed with my ambitious super hero lesson and they said, “they’re drawing are going to be more much better now.” The word “better” is a tricky word in this case, but I do expect they’re drawings to reflect more understanding of proportion, value and 3-d space. I felt like I had a choice to either choose themes that were going to challenge students conceptually while allowing their skills to stay the same, or to challenge their skills and take a more technical approach. I think I have challenged them technically and conceptually and I am glad I did. I am looking forward to next week’s self-portrait project.
Week 3:
I started this week with a lot of energy and high hopes for the “final project” I designed for The Sketchbook project. I wanted to culminate our previous lessons with a “self-portrait” project for multiple reasons. When I asked the grade 3/4’s what they wanted to do over the next 2 weeks, one student enthusiastically shouted “self-portraits!” and this was followed by audible excitement and support from the rest of the class. I had also just done a very successful self-portrait assignment in my long practicum at Eric Hamber Secondary, and I thought this lesson could easily be modified to fit the students at Brock. I had a few challenges in that we had not worked on specific face drawing and portraiture skills prior to this, and of course, building these skills takes time and patience. We did not have the luxury of time, but I still thought this was a great opportunity for a rich and meaningful project. I decided to have the students trace printed copies of them selves so they could achieve a decent likeness with out causing too much frustration and confusion. Once I had demonstrated how do draw the outline and basic details of the face, the students took to it with the typical willingness and enthusiasm. For the next lesson, I asked them to put their portraits aside and showed my example of how we would fill up the background with imagery based on their identity, and interests. This project was my of integrating the suggested theme for the Sketchbook Project: “Drawing from the Heart.” I wrote this phrase on the board and we collectively brainstormed and compiled a list of ideas to draw from:
Favourite foods, favourite places, interests (sports, hobbies, activities), visual culture (movies, books, comics, video games, etc.), cultural background, nature (plants, animals, mountains, ocean, etc.), family members, pets, memories, and wishes.
I demonstrated and instructed the students to work with pencil and brand new coloured pencils that I brought in, which caused a lot of excitement. For the next two days I witnessed an incredible amount of focus as the students filled up their pages with drawings. I often would get questions about how to draw something and my solution was to ask them to just give it a try or draw a quick example for them in their sketch book. I also suggested that they test out ideas and drawing in their sketch book. The project went by very quickly but in all it seemed like a good amount of time to spend on this project being that most of the students work very fast and do not “nit pick” and overthinking their art work, which is a common tendency with older students. I did notice a pretty strong current of influence within the students as one student would add a Fortnite logo or an X-Box controller to their drawing and I would start seeing those images pop up in many other work around the classroom. This element of collective and common imagery was much more prevalent here than in the work of the high school students. There were commonalities, yes, but the students seemed to hold on to their individuality more in their self portraits at the high school level.
The last day of class was intended to be a debrief for the students and I wanted to discuss the work and to conduct a peer share environment and a mild critique. I started class by going over all the projects and skills we learned over all. I then turned back the finished work that I glued and finish the night before. I gave them time to talk and show each other and then asked that they switch seats so they were sitting with someone new. I asked them to work in pairs and describe to each other their work and to try to educate their partner about themselves. In addition, they were encourage to give each other a high five every time they had something in common, which added a fun element. I circled the class room as they were doing this and listened in as well as facilitate some conversations that were reluctant to begin or dive into great detail. After this, I introduced the idea of “two stars and a wish,” where the students were to point out two successful elements and one thing they thought they could do better. I asked them to do this for their own work as well as their partners. I thought this was a nice window into the work of reflection and critique that most were unfamiliar with. The 3/4 students also presented me with a little booklet of thank you notes and drawings from each student which is definitely not something you see in the secondary level. This was one of many things that made this experience feel like it had nice closure and was very climactic, as opposed to an anticlimactic last day, which is kind of how the last day felt like at Eric Hamber. So much happened during the long practicum that there was no way I could get that sense of closure with all the students and teachers.
Meanwhile, during these three days, I was also preparing the “exhibition space” in the school to display the art work. I had 2 and 1/2 large bulletin boards situated in the main hallway of the school at my disposal for the exhibition. I planned that one board would display enlarged copies of the students’ sketchbook work (3-d shapes, 3-d robots, proportional figures, and super heroes)and one would be intended for the self-portrait projects. This presented a challenge as I had limited space for all of these drawings, so I tried my best to pick a fair selection of drawings from all the students. I planned out how to display the 4 projects for the 2 class and put up the display by Tuesday. The next day the students were excited and very interested in seeing the work up and I had many conversations about the display with students and teachers over the next few days. I also displayed the “monster mash-ups” (exquisite corpse) drawings on the smaller bulletin board. On the last day of the practicum I put the up the self-portrait projects. To my delight, the bulletin board was big enough to hold the exact number of artworks the students made so I didn’t have to edit them at all. I think that displaying the student artwork of this project will be my most memorable part of the practicum because I could tell how proud the students were of their work and I felt a great sense of pride as well. Even though this was a shorter practicum, with way fewer challenges, trials and tribulations, and events, this last day seemed the most climactic moment of both practicums. It really felt like this hard work, as brief and concentrated as it was, was tied of up in a nice bow for myself, the teachers and the students to see.
I greatly valued this experience at Brock, and it made me realize how much I enjoy working and creating art with these two age group. I think being a primary teacher has a lot of challenges, and I just got a small glimpse into that world, but I very much enjoyed this slice of primary teaching. I loved how willing and carefree the students were. Also, the way they show appreciation is very straight forward and obvious, which is an obvious perk. I definitely noticed a difference between the 3/4 and 6/7 in their openness, ability to breeze past mistakes, and self consciousness. I also see the difference between the grade 6/7’s and grade 8’s as they change in all these ways even more once they get to high school. I appreciated having the chance to reflect on these differences and this entire experience at Brock. I thought that both practicums were such rich learning experiences with a myriad of challenges and rewards belonging to each.