I am surrounded by history! Yesterday we toured a federal period house as well as the Salem Custom House. Nathaniel Hawthorne worked there.
Also these last two days we have visited museums and have received welcomes and presentations from their education departments. Representatives of both institutions made it clear that they value working with educators and want to make their collections useful to us. Many, including these museums, have great resources in person and online both. Yesterday was the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem and today was the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester. At the PEM we completed activities related to using objects… observe, write, share. At the WAM she told us about the studio wing of their museum and how they strive to make a connection between looking at art and making art. Both are strategies that we encourage using in our Arts LINC classrooms. At the PEM I saw a “Panorama of a Whaling Voyage” (ca. 1860) --- a wooden stage with scrolling screens. It was a colonial version of Kamishibai. At the WAM I saw a Thomas Hart Benton “Corn and Winter Wheat” that will be a good landscape to show my students for during our Field to Table unit. We are seeing works of artists represented in the Picturing America poster sets that many schools across the country received from the NEH. Today we also saw the “real” Paul Reverse silver tea set too!
Connections, connections, connections.
2 comments:
I am wondering if this format of presenting is the best format for this kind of professional development- is there enough connections snd think time?
I think teacher-participants are making their own connections like I am. We have history teachers, english teachers and art teachers. They are all approaching this with their familiar content as the basis and adding in the new content areas. This is a group that is very interested in this program and what they are offering to us. They are invested in it and taking it seriously. In another setting, perhaps during the school year when teachers are juggling teaching during the day and PD after school or on the weekend, a different format would be preferred. I agree that think time is necessary...our projects are currently a work in progress...we still have two more weeks to work on them! But I know that will go quickly too.
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