Welcome to 3rd-6th Grade Art
Hello and welcome back to a wonderful school year! Hopefully you got your fill of the heat and were able to have some fun this summer. My name is Amanda Mesenbring and I am returning for my second year teaching art with TCU. I am excited to dive into another eventful year.
I am writing this blog post to give you a bit of background on the art room and how it works. I run the art room a bit differently than past art teachers and art teachers in the area. I teach with a style that is called Teaching for Artistic Behavior, or TAB. TAB is a pedagogical strategy where students are the artists, design their projects from planning, to creation, to completion, and include their own choices or decisions within the process.
What you may notice about TAB is that not all projects your child may bring home from art will be perfectly polished. This is because TAB focuses on the developmental aspects of creativity and the projects are student centered rather than adult centered. If you would like to read more about the developmental levels of art, please check out this link.
3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th grade will have art once per five day rotation, or about once per week, for 50 minutes. When students enter the classroom, they will first meet as a large group for either a demo, discussion on our artist of the month (Starting in October), or introduction of a new art center. From there, students will get their portfolios (provided by and kept in the art room) and begin working.
On a typical day in the art room, you may see a group of students drawing, a group painting, some working in collage. or even some planning their next project or writing an artist statement about their current project. The room becomes an organized chaos of kiddos and art supplies. Students are expected to use the art supplies appropriately and place them back into their correct homes at cleanup.
I started the TAB process in January 2017 and students had great success. We showed in two local art shows, one at the Arts and Heritage Center in Montgomery and the other at Minnesota State University, Mankato. I was told by the ladies at the Heritage Center that we had some of the most diverse art pieces they had seen before. This was all in part due to the kiddos and their own creative drive. In addition, one of our now fourth grade students took home a Best in Show award.
I am excited to meet any new families to our district and reignite relationships with returning students. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me.
Best wishes,
Amanda Mesenbring
amesenbring@tcu2905.us
