This is where each Monday we are mindful of our pedagogy, slowly adjusting our lessons to match our theories.
Do you ever get tired of teaching the “have-to’s” ? I do! There was a part of my day last year and the year before that I gave up to the children. I allowed the children to vote on what they wanted to learn about. I’m not gonna lie, this increased my workload about ten fold since I had to come up with lessons and materials each night depending on what questions the children had that day, but it also increased the fun ten-fold.
The first session the children decided they wanted to learn about art. How fun right?!? I brought in a book each day that focused on a different type of art, then we explored with the medium. Throughout the time we also explored words like medium as well as what we thought about the aesthetics of different types of art.
One of children’s favorites was exploring collages. They loved being able to do anything they wanted. I was intentional about adding process based art ONLY to our exploration.
After reading all about Monet the children explored watercolors. This was their favorite medium to use while painting. While many of them chose to do gardens similar to Monet we did have a few originals as well.
After working on our art unit for several weeks the children began to lose interest. To close up the unit I had the children write out what their favorite medium was and why. We compiled all the art pieces together with their explanation and a cover page. I also included a snippet to explain to the parents what we had been doing and why.
The children loved having the freedom to tell me what they wanted to learn about and explore the next day. I loved the excitement that they brought to the table. Do you ever do child directed lessons? Do you like them more or less than curriculum structured lessons?
