The Beauty of Mosaics
My
Project called The
Beauty of Mosaic Art was chosen for this section
because shows strength in my general competencies as an
educator. This project was created for
Dr.
Forman’s CSC 570 class called Presentations,
Publications and the World Wide Web while we were studying
PowerPoint. I
took the class at the end of last summer (2002) and was just
about to start school again. As a Language Arts teacher on a
middle school team I tried to integrate as much as possible.
Our 7th and 8th grade team just hired a
new math teacher and a few days before Dr. Forman gave the
assignment we had all met at school to plan our year.
The
current social studies teacher, the former math teacher and I
had integrated in the past in a personal history unit where
the students explored their own passage of time and their
heritage. As a part of that unit we did a study of quilts and
each student created their own quilt block to contribute to a
class quilt that was later donated to the school to hang in
the 8th grade hallway. While planning the new math
teacher suggested we change the quilt portion and create
mosaics instead. She thought the mosaics would be different
and because the former math teacher got her mother to sew the
final portions of the quilts in the past and she did not know
anyone that would sew it we decided to change the unit to
mosaics.
I
was a little apprehensive about the change because I knew very
little about mosaics. I
also had spent years gathering information and books about
quilts and already had a PowerPoint and video to teach the
history and significance of quilts in our culture. The
personal history unit was the first one we taught in the
school year for 8th grade and I only had a couple
weeks before school started.
After
I pouted and heard Dr. Forman’s assignment I decided to
create a presentation to introduce the students to the beauty
of mosaics. With
the research I did to create this presentation I increased my
broad-base of art history and the techniques used to create a
mosaic. Looking back after I reflected on the whole situation
I realized that giving in and modifying my unit to create
mosaics just made me more excited about the unit because we
were doing something we never did before. The unit could stand
improvement to make all of us more effective and give us a
challenge. View The
Beauty of Mosaic Art.
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