Art & Content Area Literacy

The trip to the Georgia Museum of Art was intriguing. The work of art I chose is “Composition” by Albert Eugene Gallatin in 1936. Gallatin was an American modernist painter and collector who founded the Museum of Living Art in New York City in 1927. He exhibited various works of art by European and American modern artists including Pablo Picasso. I chose this piece because I like the appeal of abstract art and with my primary concentration being math, I thought this work of art could be incorporated in a math class. When I found this oil painting, the shapes immediately caught my attention. There are a few different shapes represented on this canvas. As an activity, I would do front loading images with different works of art including this one and have students write down what shapes they see for each image. I would then have them turn and talk to their neighbor to discuss the shapes they noticed in the different art pieces and see if they noticed shapes that their neighbor didn’t have listed. Another activity or project that can be developed could be having the students figure out the angles of the shapes presented using necessary tools like a protractor. I think this is a good way to incorporate art into the math classroom and appeal to students who have an interest.

Autumn

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Book Clubs

I’ve actually been enjoying the book I’m reading for Book Clubs. I am reading The City of Ember and it is intriguing. If I feel this way about the book, I would hope my students would be just as excited to and get into the book. It is a book that covers some content area topics like greenhouses, electricity, and utilizing resources to name a few, but it’s not a book I would only pull out excerpts. Although it has some science topics, they are spread throughout the book and I don’t think it would be as effective. As I read, I found various things in the book that I thought could be brought up in the classroom and discussed. I even seen things that students could make inferences about. I would definitely recommend this book and I will definitely read the other books in the series. This has opened my eyes to the idea of wanting to do book clubs in my classroom. I think it would depend on the book and if the concepts are clearly discussed in short sections on whether I would pull out excerpts. I like the idea of reading in content areas other than language arts because it promotes literacy and students don’t associate reading novels only with language arts. I think with having each group have their set of rules, it holds the students accountable for reading outside of class and being able to discuss in their groups what has been happening in their books.

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Autumn