First time for everything --- Lin

Before arriving at Yongfeng, we all decided what grade and which elective we would like to teach (choosing from PE, Music and Art). Being an art minor at Hamilton College and also someone who’s terrible at singing and has no athleticism, I chose to teach art as an elective. Now I teach 3rd grade English, co-teach 2nd grade English with Rachel, and 3rd -6th grade Art.

3rd grade is the year where each student receives an English name for the first time. So the first day of class, I had a hat full of names prepared for them. Each student took turns telling me something they like and in return I allowed them pick out an english name from the hat. For their Homework, I had them write their own name 10 times. For the 3rd graders this was the first time they had to actually write in English and it was funny to watch how so many names transformed to something completely different, for example: Cam became Can, Maddie became Waddie, and Kenny became Keuuy. Teaching 3rd graders can be challenging at times because a lot of the teaching is foundational work but at the same time is very fun and rewarding.

I love to paint and draw but teaching Art was very different and scary for me especially for the first few weeks. First of all, I have never taught anyone how to draw or paint before and our Art class doesn’t really have a concrete curriculum like English. However there is an Art “textbook” for each grade, their textbooks are very much dull and doesn’t require or encourage any creativity. After speaking with previous fellow, Nina, about my concerns, I felt so much better. She told me that most of her Art lessons came from various Art teachers’ blogs. Ever since then Pinterest, among many other art lessons blogs, became my favorite sites to get ideas from for my lessons. So far, these are some of the projects we have done.

                                           6th grade oil pastel Kandinsky project

                                                 5th grade Kandinsky paintings 

                                                    3rd grade fish bowl project

                                                            5th grade Water Lilies project

3-6 grade Thank you card project for Teachers' Day