During our field experience, Sarah and I were able to incorporate material from a website (www.utahindians.org) into our lesson plans. It helped us immensely by showing us great ways to not only make our lessons more interesting but also to help us demonstrate a more visual aspect of the lesson to the students. One of these lessons was the Bear dance of the Ute tribe. We had the kids watch a video of the dance and then chose 10 students, 5 of each gender, and had them try the dance while the rest of the students had two sticks, one with groves on it and the other without, and they rubbed them together to the beat of the Ute song that we played. We did get the typical reaction of the boys and the girls not wanting to dance together, but all and all we were able to get past that and they were able to have fun with it. One suggestion that was given was to teach all of the students the steps first before the dance to get them all involved and I wish now that we were able to do that.The other lesson, our art's for art's sake lesson, we drew an inspiration from the Navajo sand art and did a lesson on the symbolism of colors and shapes that they had. Each student was then given a pre-drawn picture to chose what colored sand to go where. The one problem that got drawn to this was time. It took longer than expected and we had to draw out time from other places.
All in all, I did have a good experience incorporating the arts in my field experience. I like to see the kids get into it, act it out and just in general have a more well rounded experience with the material. Through the arts, the students are able to retain more knowledge because it was more than just words on a page.
