Art Class is THE Place to be at DAA
I firmly believe I have best job in the entire school. As the Arts and Literacy Specialist, I get to teach the two things kids generally love most—art and reading. Coincidentally, the arts and children’s books are two of my favorite things ever. We will not only tackling visual art this year, but also music, dance and drama.
I also get the incredible opportunity to see every one of our AMAZING students every day. I have enjoyed getting to know the incredible personalities of our students so much over the past week and a half, and am super excited to get to know each of them even more throughout the year. Art class gives students an opportunity to express themselves in different ways. It’s a safe place to make mistakes. If we try something in art and it doesn’t work, we try something different next time but there are NO wrong answers.
We are finishing up our beginning of the year unit next week. So far we have learned to use glue from the bottle, crayons, scissors, markers, and glue sticks. HUGE SHOUTOUT to everyone who donated art supplies! They have allowed us to so many great things already. We’ve drawn David from the book David Goes to School. We’ve talked about filling people’s buckets (making them feel good, it’s from a GREAT book, Have You Filled a Bucket Today?) and have made our own buckets out of paper, as well as creating origami buckets in first grade. Kindergarten is working HARD on their cutting skills. We made a terrific shape collage on Wednesday. EVERYONE is super excited for Friday, which is when we will paint for the first time. Broderick and Diego, two of our kindergartners, ask me daily, “Miss Moquin is TODAY the day we get to paint?” I’m anticipating high levels of excitement in the art room! In a few weeks, we will be starting a unit on self-portraits and be creating many pictures of ourselves using different mediums and techniques. We will also be starting to investigate dance and movement and we are also consistently infusing music into our learning, whether it is learning new songs to sing or listening to different types of music while we work. So again, on behalf of the students and myself—thank you, Thank You, THANK YOU!
We had a new friend, Elijah, join us in first grade this week and during his tour of the school he was shown the art room, to which he proclaimed, “Art room? I LIKE ART!” and has continued to let me know every time he comes to class how much he likes art. Every project is met with a “This is COOL!” I’m so happy our students are excited and happy. In the words of Elijah, I think THAT is cool.
-Miss Moquin