Art in the Clasroom- Literacy (National Gallery Day 2)

The painting above (Calais Peer by Turner) has been the focus of much of my work in the National Gallery today. As I expected after yesterday today was also amazing, and I learnt even more! I also got to watch a very experienced gallery teacher work with a wonderful group of year 3′s in the gallery which was ace! (more on this later!)

Today we really got into the heart of using Art in the classroom, and specifically looked at how to start to approach cross curricular planning (useful for anything- not just art) and experienced a selection of great things that could be achieved within literacy from a painting. I also got to experience 2 different approaches to working with paintings…

At the start of today we were thrown into the deep end and given a name of a portrait in the gallery, and told find it (a task in itself, i’m forever getting lost in the gallery!) to sit in front of it for 15 minutes and write a monologue ‘in role’ as the person in the picture, without looking at the label to find out who was in the picture!!

I personally found this really powerful, and what people in our group wrote was really amazing (mine was more humorous but i’m sure it had some merit !). What struck me though is the power of doing this, or similar activities with children. You might want to give children more than 15 minutes(!!) but I can see that we’d get some really great pieces of writing. It could easily be developed by some drama activities such as pupil/teacher in role etc.

Watching the gallery teacher in action was also an amazing experience. This group of year 3′s were looking at ‘plants and foods’ so the brief the gallery were given was to fit the visit into this theme. The gallery teacher was amazing- she engaged the children from the off, which was great observation experience for my general teaching! The paintings were used as a base for discussion- there was little about the ‘history’ or subject/context of the paintings- instead lots of intriguing and interesting discussion emerged about seasons of plants/foods, why we keep animals etc. What really amazed me was the way the year 3′s were attentive, interested and engaged throughout the whole hour- something that apparently surprises many teachers as well!

In the afternoon, we really narrowed down on literacy, and were taken into the gallery to work in front of Calais Pier – and we were lead through an amazing poetry writing excercise. We were asked to look at the painting and write down 2 lines about the sky and 2 lines about the sea and then we created word banks and then merged the lines into a poem- our groups poem is below this post (we were quite pleased with it- although it’s by no means award winning). Again this is something that I thought was really powerful for using in the classroom, and more so actually in front of the actual painting .

We also were introduced to the ladder method of cross curricular planning (as oppose to what the gallery teachers called the ‘scatter gun’ approach) – where everything builds on what was done before (I’ll probably blog more about this when I really get my head around it! ). But from the one painting above I was enthused because there was a whole host of activities could be possible, especially in literacy- Narrative writing, non-fiction texts (newspapers, biographies), story telling, drama, dialogue writing, researching, lots of poetry etc and outside of literacy there are clear links to music, science (how do we predict the weather etc) and of course art!

What really struck me today is the 2 different approaches I witnessed- we had the teaching about ‘the’ art (a bit like the monologue activity- i.e. what the painting is about, where is was made etc) and the teaching through art (the literacy activities, the yaer 3 visits etc). I personally think the most power can be achieved through combining both- but I’m sure I’ll get to explore this more this week!

Also, if you are interested in Art, I’d recommend looking at Turners picture on the Galleries website- I saw today it’s an amazing painting (2 words I never thought i’d utter before I started this week!)

[It's probably worth noting that I know all these things have been done before- but it's exciting for me to see how they can be applied in context with a painting/stimuli etc!]

Tomorrow (snow permitting!!) I’m going to be spending the whole day doing physical art activities so I’m sure I’ll have some interesting tales to tell tomorrow (I’m dyspraxic so my art skills are rather lacking- but we’ll see !)

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It’s just struck me the extremes I’ve blogged about this evening- the very old (the paintings) and the very new (the ICT)- but I think there are quite a few similarities between the approaches used in both!

Classroom Tales