My First Week as a Boise State University Student

Last Tuesday (1/20) was the first day of my first Boise State University class, "Art Education Methods For Elementary School." It sounds like I will be mostly doing a lot of observing other art teachers in the process of teaching art classes to K-8th grade kids--30 hours worth to be exact! Part of my homework will be to plan a short series of art lessons for kids. That will probably be easy since I have already planned many lessons on paper and have already used them when teaching kids art lessons downstairs in my house.

Then last Thursday, our class when to the Boise Art Museum to observe a tour guide conduct a tour for a classroom of kids from Horizon Elementary school. The art that was being discussed was a series of works by a Japanese artist, Jun Kaneko. He specializes in large (7-9 feet) ceramic pieces called Dongos and other art work that focuses on various patterns of lines and circles. It was fun to observe the questions and comments that the kids would make about the art--questions like, "That looks like a big jelly bean." Then we observed the kids going into an art studio to make their own version of a Dongo. They had the kids make whatever kinds of patterns they wanted onto a large paper cup, which sort looked like a Dongo in miniature.