Mrs.
Joanna is a unique lady who possesses a charming energetic personality. She is
creative, imaginative and artistic by nature in class and anywhere. She entered
our classroom carrying stuff that usually goes to the waste basket or for
recycling. There were bags filled with cardboard, stationary, and boxes of
various colors, shapes and sizes. Her touch of art was clearly visible by using
personification, as she placed the scarf over her posters an image of human
being attending her poetry exhibition could be interpreted in our mind. The
table was full and I found myself engaged in finding room for her to display
her posters. I was searching for things that I might find in my classroom to
make her posters steady; wondering about what her next step might be. Mrs.
Joanna started by advising us that we should always be prepared and ready, to
be well equipped showing us her pencil case, stapler, scotch tape, scissors,
crayons, A4 papers and also nylon bags. She was pointing at the frames and
edges of her posters coaching us to make ours clear, neat and to leave a little
white border to make it look better. She was aware of every single incident
related to her lesson. Then she started generating her questions, what can we
do with a big “fridge box” and she continued like that until she heard the
magic word “puppet” her lessons’ objective. She cut a medium size box and
created a “puppet theater” with a white curtain made out of the nylon bag.
While cutting the cardboard, she was very professional and she did not forget
to create a painting background to make her theater appealing to the audiences.
She was directing us to let our students do things themselves, to paint, glue
and cut their drawings. She was the master and we were her puppet toys as she
asked us to write within 10 minutes a story and perform it in the puppet
theater. We found ourselves involved in writing a dialogue, creating characters,
drawing and coloring them, cutting their shapes and gluing them on A4 paper
stick, then playing our roles and acting.
Mrs. Joanna manipulated
art to facilitate learning. She demonstrated a lesson in a smooth way moving
for one activity to another linking them together without the students’
recognition of the transaction. She used story telling from beginning to the
end of her lesson as she was narrating to us about her life and experiences,
about the kid wearing the hat on Independence Day, and about the edges of the
frames, drawing. Her intention was to guide, prompt, and encourage us to be
creative and to involve our students in doing their part of work. She used
critical thinking by making us deduce her “rules” which she did not state, but
lead us to conclude them. Everything she said or did was implemented in her
lesson. She used inductive method, inquiry for experiential learning in a
communicative way and she made the students collaborate to produce their puppet
show. We were engaged in writing the activity in pairs. By doing this the
students used brainstorming and the four skills, as we were speaking when
discussing our script, writing it then reading it and later on, when acting we
were the real audiences listening and watching each other puppet show. The
learning was teacher centered and student centered in the same session. All This
proves how professional Mrs. Joanna is.
