This week Katie and I taught the first day of our first art lesson at Polaris. In our classroom of 4th and 5th grade students, we introduced the project "Story of a Star." Throughout the semester students are supposed to be learning about the sun, the moon, and the stars through interdisciplinary learning, so we have chosen to make these the theme of our unit plan. In this lesson, students will be reflecting on their personal stories and expressing them in the form of a paper mache "star" sculpture.
Our goal with this lesson was to encourage students to really make connections between the universe and their personal narratives. To delve further into the interdisciplinary aspect, we also wanted to incorporate the perspectives and stories of other cultures. We began the lesson with a video which zooms out from humans on earth all the way to a view of our galaxy and beyond that, which led students to reflect on how they relate to the rest of the universe. Next, we introduced a contemporary South African artist who creates paintings to express his culture's origin stories about the stars. Through this, we hoped students would really make a connection between the universe and how all different types of people have their own stories and express them in a variety of ways. Students worked toward answering the question, what is your story?
We created an ideation worksheet to help students generate ideas and document any thoughts they have about their own stories. This idea generating process seemed like a very effective tool for self-reflection and making connections, so I decided to fill out my own ideation sheet to share #mystory about teaching. I focused my answers to reflect on how the questions relate to my experience with education, learning, and teaching.
#mystory is still evolving of course! Hopefully this ideation process will become part of my weaving process in the future.