The first week of school placement was focused on getting to know my new students and becoming familiar with the Covid-19 restrictions in the art room.
Getting to know the students
For my 1st year and 5th year class groups I welcomed them to my lessons by introducing myself and asking them to create a personal mind map, where they were the central figure. Their interests and personality or family traits would be drawn or written around them. This task was successful, though some students did struggle to think about what they liked or what to include in their mind map.
My 5th year group are doing a project which will culminate in the production of a Zine, so I decided that the first class with them would involve making a Mini-Me-Zine, they would make a zine from an A4 piece of paper and add information about themselves on each page. This would demonstrate to me the skill level of the students, the speed at which they worked and give them a lead in to the project and an understanding of the format which was new to them all. This worked out as a very enjoyable task for the class, and I extended the task into the second class as I had underestimated the time they would want to spend on it.
The restrictions in the art room due to Covid-19 are somewhat restrictive, in terms of time and materials management. Students cannot share their materials, a question that arose on a number of occasions. I think the real difficulty will be found in the one to one support of a student. I am used to finding materials, support studies or interesting articles for students and being able to share them in the hope that they might be useful or interesting. This cannot happen in the same casual way as before. Though it is of course possible to email the information instead through the school system.
All in all it was a successful week of settling in to a new school and I am confident that the restrictions in place are easy enough to work within.