Artist in the Classroom, shadow puppets, drama, visual arts, literacy, poetry, media, critical thinking, time sensitive feedback

In the month of February “Artist in the Classroom” Shelly King came into my 5/6 classroom to work with my students.  Students were creating shadow puppets and then they were asked to work together in small groups to create a short dramatic presentation.  I decided that this would be a good chance to bump up poetry reading in class so for the few weeks before our first visit we read and shared lots of poetry.  A great source for poetry reading is poetry4kids.com. For the first 2 sessions students worked on creating their characters and practiced reciting the poems focusing on voice and movement.  During the 3^rd session students we used the Ipads to record student presentations.  Using the class created Success Criteria the class (and the artist) provided feedback for each group.  Students were given work time to use the feedback and then present again.  The Ipads were used again to video the updated performance.  It was really easy to see that students had listened to and used the feedback to improve their presentations.  Using video has definitely become an important tool in our classroom.  I was able to watch the videos later and pull marks for drama, oral, visual arts, and reading and most importantly, the problem solving and critical thinking that I observed was incredible!