Written by 2023-24 AFA Intern Mackenzie Timbrell
On Wednesday, November 15th, I had the privilege of shadowing Nicole Hogsett and Briget Villanueva. Nicole is based in third-grade classrooms, and Briget is in kindergarten classrooms. Being able to see two different age groups interacting with art activities was really interesting. The first class I went to was Nicole’s third grade class, in which we started out with a few warm-up games to get comfortable with acting, etc. The main activity of the day was for the children to act out “Good Neighbor” skits where two students would act out a disagreement between two neighbors and the rest of the class would have to give them advice on how to resolve the problem. The students were particularly engaged with this activity and loved acting out the skits in front of the class. The audience also gave some particularly great advice on conflict resolution! The children were using the puppets they had made in a previous class to act out the skit, which I believe helped them to feel more confident. At the end of the class, we said our final goodbye to conclude our activities for the day.
Then, I moved on to Briget’s kindergarten classroom. In this class, the children were continuing a pumpkin project they had started the class before. They had previously made pumpkins out of paper and colored them in, so in this class they were creating the pumpkin patch to put their pumpkins on top of. This required the students to glue tissue paper onto a regular piece of paper to make the grass and hay. Then, the children were able to draw farm animals on their pumpkin patches. Besides the children needing a bit of help with the glue, they were totally invested in this project and loved the idea of drawing farm animals into the patch. We wrapped up the day and activity with a final goodbye and recapping what they had accomplished that day. It was such a wonderful experience being able to join these two classes, and I hope that I can return to help out with more art!
