My mentee is an energetic, excited young lady who just happens to have a cognitive disability. By working with her, I have learned so many new things for my future as an educator. I am currently taking a special education course, so spending time with my mentee also earns me some credit in a field experience requirement. I would never imagine that a volunteer opportunity would eventually turn into a learning experience for me that actually helps me earn credit in my classes. I am very blessed to have been matched with the amazing girl that I have, she teaches me something every week!
This week, she was behind in her art class that she has during our meetings. Normally she would step out of the class to do whatever we wanted, but today she had to work on an art project in class that she was behind on. Luckily, as an art education major, I wanted to be in there too! Ms. B, the middle school art teacher came over and my mentee introduced us. She seemed glad that I was in there to help Tricia, so when I told her I was also an art ed major, she got a smile on her face and asked a little about when I would be student teaching and so on.
In the 8th grade class, they are working on sketch book assignments while still pursuing other lesson plans. For the first five to ten minutes of class, they were sketching wooden figures that they could pose in any position. While they were drawing, Ms. B asked them a question from a stack of cards (which I thought was a pretty good way of getting the students attention). The question was, what looks more interesting at night than it does during the day? The answers were very interesting:
- pumpkins
- Eiffel Tower
- black lights
- Christmas lights
- New York City
- Christmas Tree
- snowman
- neon lights
When the timer went off, Ms. B told the class that they would be moving into the clay room in order to work on their cartoon sculpture assignment. The students are working on a project of sculpting a cartoon character of their choice out of clay. They only need to work on the face of the character. My mentee was working with a Pokemon character while others were working with Puss in Boots, Donkey, Stitch, Phineas and Ferb and so on. The students seemed to have a sense of repetition, as they all knew how to behave and to act in the classroom.
It was very interesting to see what Ms. B thought was too loud compared to what Ms. M thinks is too loud in the classroom. While I observe at the elementary school the students can get extremely loud and it is not a problem, while a regular level of chatter and laughter urged Ms. B to stop the class and add more work to their day. Instead of adding only two features to the busts of their characters today they had to make it three instead. I enjoyed seeing how Ms. B and her tone of voice could change so much in a class, as she was very friendly to me, but very stern with her students. It was definitely an awesome experience to observe at a different school for a different grade. My mentee and I had a great afternoon working with the clay, I taught her some new ways of making shapes and creatively finding circles and triangles within the clay tools to trace instead of trying to do it free handed.
Her shapes were so accurate while she traced, I was very impressed! When we did not trace anything, she had a hard time making things exactly the same. She hated how the ears of her character weren't looking alike, so we used a method Ms. B showed the class of cutting one out and tracing the shape to cut out the other one. She caught on very quickly and I think she impressed Ms. B because she got so much work done today!
Even though this was not planned, I thought it very suiting to take note of the class today. I had a great time, and I think my mentee will be doing very well on her project. I'm glad I was able to help her in the classroom setting today! I've never stayed in a class with her before, and it was very beneficial for both her and I.
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