LCE Lesson Plan Reflection

Context:

In EDLIT 734, Literacy within the Disciplines, we focused on how to integrate the arts into literacy. This class showed us, as literacy educators, how we can incorporate all the arts, not just visual art, into our classroom. For the LCE lesson plan, I decided to incorporate aesthetic education and visual art into one of my social studies lesson plans.

Reflection:

When I created this lesson plan, the focus of the current unit was for students to learn about different cultures through reading folktales. In order to stay aligned with our current unit, I developed an arts-infused lesson using my next social students lesson, which involved reading a legend from Mexico. In our previous social studies unit, the students learned all about Mexican culture. The goal of this lesson was for the students to use what they already knew about Mexico to notice how legends reveal significant characteristics about a culture. To integrate visual art into this lesson, I decided to have the students show their understanding of what corn meant to Mexico by having them illustrate a front over for the “The Legend of Maize”. On this cover, the students were asked to combine what they already knew about the popularity of corn in Mexico with their new knowledge of how significant corn was through visual representation. The aesthetic education piece was that the students needed to think about their prior knowledge, synthesize what they read, and use creative expression in order to convey meaning through drawing. Overall, I enjoyed this experience and I could tell my students did too. As someone who always tries to make lessons engaging through movement and art, I'm going to continue to incorporate these elements as often as possible, especially when it comes to literacy.