Field Work Nov. 21, 2008

Week Three
This week we taught two lessons to finish up our hieroglyphs lesson. We taught on Monday and on Thursday. On Monday we taught about the tomb paintings. We talked about the most common Egyptian gods, how they looked and what they symbolized. We also talked about shallow picture plane, horror vacui, propaganda, color, and point of view. In a slide show we talked about the tomb paintings using these elements. We encouraged the students to participate and point out the elements they saw in each picture. This lesson went really well, they caught on to the concept very quickly. We went through the slide show a lot faster than we had expected and finished the lesson in about a half an hour. So we should've prepared more pictures.
On Thursday, we went over the elements and techniques we had discussed on Monday. We then had the students create their own tomb painting portraying themselves as the queen or Pharaoh. We asked them to use the elements we had discussed on Monday. We also provided examples of tomb paintings on an overhead and on the computer for them to look at while they worked. They really enjoyed this activity and came up with some really neat designs. They were given about and hour and a half to finish their paintings and most of the students were able to finish in this amount of time.
This experience was wonderful. I loved the teacher and class that we worked with. I really enjoyed teaching. There is a lot I would change about the lessons we taught in order to make them better. I have a better understanding of how to gauge the time the lesson will take and how to prepare the materials for each lesson. It was really fun being part of their classroom and helping them learn.