The Influence of an American Teacher

Current AU time and date: 6:36 pm, Friday 5/17/13
Current US time and date: 4:36 am, Friday 5/17/13

It's Fridayyy!

Well, technically almost Saturday for me, but happy Friday to you all in the US! Thought I would do a quick post before the weekend to tell you all about my week! While my class took the NAPLANs during the morning, I worked with a year 2 class. Because of testing, their teacher was needed to help supervise other classes. The second graders were absolutely delightful! I introduced them to Barbie and they loved her; she got a lot of attention, so she was pretty happy.

In the afternoons I went back with my class. The afternoons went as usual with math, history, health, P.E., spelling, etc. On Wednesday afternoon, I was in charge of art again. I recently decided I'm going to teach about a new American artist every week in order to tie in some American culture; the kids are pretty excited about it. This week I did a lesson on American artist, Andy Warhol--ever hear of him? He is from Pittsburgh and was a leading figure in the visual arts movement known as "pop art" in the 1960's. You would probably recognize some of his famous pop art pieces...

He liked to explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture, and advertisement. His art was an observation of what was important in the lives of Americans during the 60's and 70's, and what was important was popular culture. Because of this, a lot of his work included celebrities such as the one above with Britney Spears.  

And here's Andy! The man that became a leader in pop art and culture due to his ability to take simple, common, everyday items or images and rise them to fine art. 

 For the day's art lesson, after learning about pop art, I decided I was going to have my students create their own pop art! I created an example to show them as I explained the directions. Below you can see my example of a very famous man in some pretty crazy colors! Andy used a lot of patterns, repetition, complimentary colors and bright colors to really make his art, art. Our goal was to do the same!

My Elvis example

After explaining the directions and passing around my example, I had the students come to the back table with me to watch a demonstration of how I expected them to use the pastels and colors in order to achieve that "Warhol" look. The students helped me pick out the colors for this demo picture, and I worked on it with them watching so they could see what I was doing. Here is our demo picture once it was completed (I think it turned out really cool!):

After the demonstration, the kids were off to work on their own. Take a look at some of their final products, they turned out really awesome! 

Hard at work!

Love this multi-colored zebra

Justin Bieber was a big hit with the girls. They all jumped to grab his picture. Between him and the One Direction boys, the girls were going crazy!

This is one of the boys' Michael Jackson pieces, I think it looks so cool. 

 A few more final products. Overall, the American art lesson was a hit!

Aside from tying in America through art, I've been asked to bring my American influence in during P.E.! Remember when I told you they wanted me to teach some of the kids how to do cheerleading moves during gym? Well, ever since that day I have had boys and girls from year five AND six coming up to me, begging to do more cheerleading with them. Yesterday, my year 5 class split into two, and I worked with the boys then the girls on some cheerleading things. The boys were really excited about it and ready to beat the girls by showing them up. The girls felt the heat of the competition though and stepped their game up. At this point, I'm not quite sure which team made the better cheerleaders, what do you think?

Today, at the end of the day I had a sixth grader come up to me to ask if we could do cheerleading for the last 30 minutes of the day. I went into her classroom and asked the teacher if this was okay. The teacher told me that she would love that and announced to the students, if they wanted to do cheerleading, to line up at the door with me--3/4 of the class lined up! Just like yesterday, these boys also wanted to show off and beat the girls by being the best at what I was having them all do. I must say, the boys won this competition. I only had about 5 girls with me towards the end and all of the boys still. The boys didn't give up! I loved the persistence and could tell they were having fun. 

Here's my year 6 crew this afternoon. I'm so proud of them and my year 5 class for being such great listeners and super safe stunters. People could have been seriously injured if they were goofing around and not listening, but they stayed focused and safe! 

So, there ya have it! Those are two ways that I'm bringing an American influence to the Australian schools :) if you have any other ideas, let me know!

Happy Friday and have a wonderful weekend. I'm off on a bus tour tomorrow starting at 8 am, can't wait! I hope you all have fun with any plans you may have for the weekend, too.

As always, "cheers"!

-Miss Probasco

P.S. If you haven't already done so, please copy and paste your pen pal letters into an email for me--I can't open the attachment because I don't have the same software you guys used to type them. You can attach your pictures in the email as well, I'll put the letter and picture together into a Word doc. Thank you :)