Field Trip

Wednesday was a half day at PAS, the school where I am student teaching. I did not know what to expect for the day since I work in the science classroom and no students were going to be visiting our room. My classroom mentor and I went on a field trip with a 3rd grade class to the Arthur Ross Gallery at Penn. It was amazing! The current exhibit is watercolor paintings by David Kennedy. He beautifully painted detailed pictures of various buildings in West Philadelphia during the 1800's. There was an educational program that two local artists put on for the 3rd grade class. They first had them carefully observe and describe the paintings in the gallery. Then, they did a performance storytelling piece about the artist's life. It was truly moving. They used shadows, projections, and 3-D props to help illustrate the story. The students (and teachers!) were very engaged. The students were literally getting out of their seats to try to see every part of the action. At the end of the storytelling, the artists asked some questions to review some of the main points of the story. The students clearly understood the main ideas and took away important lessons about the artist's life, the industrial revolution, and changes in West Philadelphia.

It made me think about how I could incorporate this type of learning in a classroom setting. Most of my previous educational experience has been at informal educational settings such as after-school programs, museum interpretation, or outdoor education workshops. Therefore, my limited curriculum writing experience was based in trying to "sell" education as recreation or entertainment. I wonder why I couldn't use this idea of performance-incorporated education in a classroom. Obviously it would not be appropriate all of the time. But I was thinking that it might be interesting to use props and other performance elements in read aloud's and then have the students model this using a book of their choice or a piece of their own writing. It would also be interesting to use with a history lesson, as these artists did in their piece. After the storytelling part of the field trip, the students had a chance to draw their favorite painting from the gallery. The artist incorporated a small lesson about perspective and proportion before they began, which included a mini math lesson. Overall, the field trip was a great example of how to use a single topic for an integrated curriculum unit and made me think about creative ways of teaching lessons.