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As I was brainstorming blog post ideas, I started thinking about what my biggest school project was as a first year student in the Art Education MAT program. There are many presentations and projects, but my favorite — and most challenging — project of my first year was the Teacher Artwork Sample.

After learning how to properly detail a lesson plan, giving anticipatory sets (those are lesson hooks to get students interested in the topic you’re about to teach), demonstrating art techniques, and receiving feedback on ways to enhance your teaching style, the Teacher Artwork Sample (also lovingly known as TAWS) puts everything you’ve been working on in your first year all together.

For Art Education MAT students, the Teacher Artwork Sample is done in the second semester in an elementary school. You’re required to spend a minimum of twenty hours at the school you are placed in to observe the art educator and ask questions that will help you create your lesson, choose a grade level to teach your lesson to, gather information about the school’s neighborhood and the school’s demographic, do a pre-assessment of your lesson to see what the students already know, teach your lesson, have students complete your lesson, and do a post-assessment. It sounds like a lot, but planning is the whole point of it!

For my project, I was fortunate enough to be placed with the teacher I’ll be doing my student teaching with this spring at Talcott Fine Arts and Museum Academy in the West Town area. It was really great to get to know my cooperating teacher that much better. For my lesson, I decided to integrate reading strategies, since as a first year Art Education MAT student, I took a class on how to teach reading at the middle school level. I figured if I was learning how to teach reading to middle schoolers, I could certainly apply some of my new found skills to first graders! I did a read-aloud of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. I had the students focus on the primary and secondary colors and the shapes used in the story. They used cut construction paper to create their own caterpillar or butterfly using varied geometric shapes and all of the primary and secondary colors.

Before my read-aloud and lesson to the class, I had to do my pre-assessment. I had students identify shapes and colors on a piece of paper and had them try to arrange shapes (I gave them circles, triangles, squares, and rectangles) into a caterpillar or a butterfly. The reason why I did this was to make sure they knew the difference between primary and secondary colors and were able to use drawings of geometric shapes to create a recognizable image.

After this, the fun began with reading the story and creating the actual project! Here is a picture of actual student work as it was being made:

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My biggest tip to a first year student doing this project is to plan ahead, know your art teacher’s class schedule, and decide which grade to teach your lesson to early. This project is exciting and challenging, and it’s great to get in front of actual students and teach!