Tuesday 23 June 2020

Empowering our learners...

Last week I received an email from one of our lovely Year 6 students. David chats to me each week when I'm on duty about the art he is doing at home and asks me questions about the art we are doing in Year 7/8, a connection we've had for a number of years since he spent some time in my class doing art. In the email he shared a photo of one of the drawings he had done at home, and asked if I would like him to come and teach this style of drawing to my class.

I imagine it took courage to email me and ask this question so I replied immediately saying that I would love him to come into my class and take an art lesson. On Friday we sorted out a time that worked for his teachers, and between us decided that his art lesson would take place the following week on Tuesday afternoon. He was very excited and told me he would let me know on Monday what I needed to have ready for him. This is exactly what happened and on Monday I was given my list!

I arranged for David to work with a group of my Y7/8 students. Before his visit we talked about how we needed to show him respect, and as one of my lovely students said "... and build him up because he's definitely showing one of our school values by being confident. Don't worry Mrs Anderson we'll look after him." 

Today I got everything ready and after lunch David came in armed with two exemplars and a huge smile. He loved every minute of his art lesson, as did the students he was working with. I'm so glad I said yes to this, because today I saw this boy shine.


3 comments:

  1. Hi, Mrs Anderson

    Oh, thanks for the blogpost, now I feeled loved by everyone in my art group and thanks for having me. I really want to teach your class more about the types of art that I did.

    Regards,
    David (One of the year six students)

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    Replies
    1. Hi David

      Thank you for your lovely comment. You did an amazing job teaching the students in my class and I'm so glad you enjoyed sharing your drawing skills with us. You are most welcome to teach art in my class any time as we loved learning from you.

      Mrs Anderson

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  2. Hi Robyn,

    This is such a great example of how we can teach our children to be confident learners AND teachers! It is so important to teacher our children to reflect and recognise different values that their peers demonstrate in different situations.

    This is a great reminder of how much our children can learn from being given opportunities to be the teachers. Sometimes the best thing we can do as the teacher is to take a step back and support the children in being the experts. The amount of learning they get from these situations is so valuable!!

    Hannah

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