Week 3 of Peer Teaching

Week 3 of Peer Teaching

During this project we covered a lesson on scratch board art.  This lesson was very interesting for the simple fact we first colored a piece of card stock with colored pencils.  Using this style we used all different kinds of colors and were instructed to make it as bright and as colorful as possible.  We then painted that card stock black completely.  Then after allowing the card stock to dry, we took a skewer and chiselled out a design that we had thought of previously.  As you can see the bright colors pop through  the black and really make the whole process very fun and cool.
            I would love to use the process in my class, the only real issue that i have with this lesson is that i do not know how i would use it.  A couple of ideas that i think that you could use it in would be in a homeroom style of a middle school class.  This would allow students to get creative with the art and you could stretch it out over the course of the semester.  If you used it throughout this class you could give students the proper amount of time they would need to fully understand the history of scratch board art.  I thought this was a bright and interesting project. It was certainly fun, my only question on this project of when we could use this project.

  In this lesson we learned about the ancient art of origami.  During the course of this lesson we learned about the history of origami and  the rules behind origami.  After first learning of the history of origami we learned about rules while the rules are pretty simple they are very important.  The most important rule of origami is not to skip steps.  After learning the basics we learned first how to make a fish, than a frog, and a puppy.  Then we were asked to make our own animal and write a story.  This was most definitely the funnest lesson of the semester.
           I would most definitely use this lesson in my classroom.  This lesson could easily be used when covering the history of a country like Japan.  You could do this lesson in history portion of a 5th grade class.  The only thing that i would do differently would be to not write a story about random animals, i would have the animals that they made tell a story about a tall tale of the Japanese culture.  Other then that i thought the lesson was a smashing success, and would without a doubt use this lesson in my own classroom.