The 2015 Fine Arts Festival

The annual Fine Arts Festival recently came to a close. It is one of my favorite times of the school year, as it is a chance to connect with all the other county art teachers and the innovative and wonderful work they our doing with their students. I enjoy gathering up our student’s work from Walton to share with the greater community. It is a chance to showcase their hard work, as well as provide a source of affirmation for them to have work chosen for exhibition.  It also gives me time as their visual arts teacher, to step outside the daily whirlwind of studio practice, and take in the process and work itself, from a different perspective. Each year it has proven to be an experience that renews my commitment to the visual arts, and reaching out to younger generations to share it. It also continues to prove, every year, that it is a lot of work! Work that is worth it. From keeping the students striving to produce their best work, to mounting it all for display ( usually late at night at home, and often until the wee hours of the morning of the festival set-up), to writing lesson descriptions to communicate the connections and concepts being taught, and artist statements to reflect the ideas in individual works of art, to waking early in the morning on the Sunday of set-up, assembling panels with the effort of a whole team of visual art educators, and the much appreciated assistance of Building Services personnel from the county as well as the mall. We work together to get the panels covered and our work hung and everything ready by 12pm, when the mall opens. It is always a site to behold. Art work from every school in the county, filling the mall from end to end, exhibited with care, commitment, and collaboration. It always feels wonderful to take a deep breath, and enjoy a job well done while strolling the length of the mall and taking it all in. Then, two weeks later, we join together again, this time on a Sunday evening, to take it all down. This year Walton had 5 works of art chosen for display at the county office building, and some of these will also be in the calendar next year. Keep an eye out for them! Congratulate the students that created works of art that will represent our school, for the whole county to appreciate.

                                                FAF prep :

                                                       SETTING UP:

 Students At Work CREATING the ART...the most important part!

 A few of the chosen pieces:

                                   Sophia Zoll :  Portrait of Nelson Mandela

  

Violetta Miller  : Imagined Room Collage

Author, Fred Bowen will be speaking to 6^th and 7^th graders on Thursday, March 19^th as part of the Virginia Festival of the book. He will arrive at 9:30 and give 2 one hour sessions. More specific details to follow. Community members are welcome to attend. You can find out more about him by checking out the links below:

 

http://www.fredbowen.com/

 

http://www.fredbowen.com/works.htm

Parent/Teacher conferences will be held on Thursday, February 26, 2015. Please use the links below to sign up for a conference with your child’s teachers.

 Teachers with the last name A-H:

www.SignUpGenius.com/go/60B0B4CA8A92B0-teacher1/

 Teachers with the last name K-Z:

www.SignUpGenius.com/go/60B0B4CA8A92B0-teacher/

Teaching for Perplexity

The past two months have flown by.  On October 11^th, my wife and I welcomed our first child – Will into the world.  It feels like September was just a short while ago and we were in Virginia Beach enjoying Labor Day.  Will is starting to smile, make cute baby ‘coo-ing’ and sleep for solid four hour chunks at a time.  Those luxurious four hour segments were not always the norm.  Sleep during the first month was scarce and I would often find myself watching Sportscenter or listening to sermons at 3am to pass the time while Will fell asleep.  One night several weeks ago I stumbled across a YouTube channel run by a math teacher I admire greatly – Dan Meyer.  I initially heard of Dan during my first year teaching in the Mississippi Delta and watched one of his more famous videos – ‘Math Class Needs a Makeover’.  I could immediately relate to his struggle of making math engaging.  In it he describes the math teacher – student relationship as follows:

“I sell a product to a market that doesn’t want it but is forced by law to buy it”

I distinctly remember the moment during that first year when I realized, many of my students don’t like math, believe they can’t do it and don’t see any practical application of the workbook problems they’ve been encountering since kindergarten.   In the past five years of teaching I’ve worked hard to make math meaningful, engaging and applicable to real life.   Through technology infusion in the classroom, the ‘maker curriculum’ and the push to make teaching more than just preparing for the SOL, I’ve tried to make my classroom one where the work we do has application that reaches beyond the annual standardized test.

A recent challenge posed while watching one of Dan Meyer’s videos at 3am holding Will was to change the progression of each lesson.  About 98% of the time I would start with a standard, students would take notes, work out problems, ask questions then try an enrichment/application level activity.  In Dan’s video ‘Teaching for Perplexity’ he challenges educators to start with a real life, engaging, thought-provoking question and embed the standards in the question.

            

Today in class I handed my Core + students the 7^th grade VDOE formula sheet when they walked in and told them to create the six shapes on the formula sheet and record the dimensions on a graphic organizer I created.  It’s been amazing to see the change in student engagement transitioning from the traditional ‘sage on stage’ teaching model to challenging students to create something and asking probing questions along the way.  I’ve found that with this new model students can learn at their own pace and they genuinely want to ‘complete the challenge’ set before them.  It also allows me to circulate the room and give more individualized attention.  The most astonishing aspect to this change though was that during our 40 minute activity today we were able to discuss evaluating expressions, order of operations, exponents, nets of 3D shapes, area, perimeter, volume and surface area.  When I am teaching in front of the class and students are working on a worksheet, it is incredibly difficult to teach more than one or two skills at a time.  This may prove to be the most important benefit to the change in classroom model.

 

In all honesty, I do not use this model everyday but am trying to implement it more and more each week.  I will leave you with a challenge Mr. Meyer posed during a recent TED talk.  Study the graph below that shows water consumption during the Olympic Gold Medal Hockey Game.

What caused the highs and lows?  Where is the math in this graph?  What standards could this graph be used to teach?