Routine

Now that I have finally realized my dream of teaching art at the Chilmark School I have started to experiment with behavior modification in the art room.

This post is about routine. I think that school should be safe and predictable (which does not exclude adventurous and fun) so daily routines are important.

Every art class students come in and look at a prompt on the board, they then silently draw for 3 minutes. It is a warmup/transition into the art room, once they are finished they hand them to me, and sit on the rug.

The second half of the transition is reading the Word of the Week on the board. It is usually an art vocabulary word that aligns with the state standards and relates to the demonstration/lecture.

Once we have warmed up and students have read and discussed the Word of the Week, I tell them the plan for the day, and they get to work as quickly as possible.

It takes about 10 minutes to do this intro but I have found it is worth it for the consistency and stability it brings. If we ever skip this routine for some reason students always express that they miss it.