Visual & Performing Arts & Physical Education
Visual & Performing Arts & Physical Education
The Visual and Performing Arts are essential to supports children’s creativity, reflective, listening, and communication skills. Thus, in order to teach Visual and Performing Arts in an elementary school setting, I must possess an in depth knowledge of music, dance, theater, and the visual arts. When it comes to music, I must help my students to improve their skills in recognizing rhythmic patterns, musical forms, melody, and harmony as well as in developing their ability to sing and play melodies while at the same time improving their accuracy and technique. For dance, I must teach my students a variety of locomotor and axial movements. I must also guide my students to move in place or across a given space at different rhythms and tempos. In theatre, it is essential that students learn the jargon associated with the discipline such as character, plot, and setting. Also, in theatre students can learn to develop cooperative skills as well as their ability to produce a range of facial expressions, gestures, and movements that will help them to develop character. Lastly, in the visual arts, I must help my students recognize and produce pieces that are created through different artistic medias (pencil, paint, water colors, etc.), that contain different patterns, textures, shapes, color, and perspective, and teach them how to evaluate their own work and those of others and different time periods. Most importantly, students must learn the similarities and differences these arts possess across different cultures.
I have learned many of these requirements through my Kinesiology 447 and Art 301 courses. Kinesiology 447, Dance in the Elementary School, taught me a variety of locomotor and axial movements and how to move in place as well as across space. Not only that, but it also taught me the physical abilities of children at each age and rules to improve their learning outcome. In Art 301, I learned how to manipulate different art medias. I also learned how dimension, perspective, patterns, texture, shape and color mold an art piece. Albeit, I still need to improve my precision when producing dimensional objects, which I hope to improve through practice.
The artifacts I have chosen for the Visual and Performing arts are a lesson plan I conducted in Kinesiology 447 in cooperation with two classmates, and a book I produced in my in my Art 301. My dance lesson plan highlights my knowledge of children’s cognitive and physical abilities at a certain age, locomotor and axial movements, and my ability to produce a lesson plan and to work in cooperation. These skills align with K-5 dance standards. Finally, my artwork illustrates my ability to work with different art medias, patterns, shapes, colors, and perspective. It also demonstrates my ability to produce a hardcover bookbinding. Again, these skills are aligned with K-5 art standards. In the end, my objective is to improve students’ ability to produce innovative work and movements that will give them the skills necessary to produce their own artwork, or related, in the future.