Hello, this is my first year teaching and I am teaching 4-12th grade art at a private school. It's a wide range and I'm barely keeping up with all the lesson planning! I've been having continuous issues with my junior high students especially finishing projects super fast. I barely have time to explain the whole project and they are done! I cant keep up! I feel like we've done so many projects this semester! If there's any down time they go wild! Any suggestions for slowing down the process? I'm not talking about activities students can do if they finish early. I'm talking about ways I can encourage students take their time so that they can reach their full potential and keep my sanity. Simply saying "take your time" doesn't do it. Thanks!!
Something I did with my elementary students was to break the project into parts. For instance, we were doing simulated x-ray style bark paintings. We looked at x-ray style bark paintings and talked about what we saw and made simple notes. I also had a recording of a didgeridoo playing in the background, which provoked some questions. For you that might mean 1/2 the period getting them to determine subject and style. (presuming discussion is possible) Next, I presented them with photocopies of skeletal fish, bats, lizard, and small mammals. I had them sketch one of each without tracing. Next, we chose one skeletal image and drew it 3 times larger on brown paper bags and painted them with white tempera. Once dry, we used markers to add dots and outlining. To shorten my suggestion, scaffolding your lesson objectives so that each step has a purpose that builds to the next step and next objective. Discussion, practice sketches, draw and paint, embellish and finish, critique and comparison, display. Something to avoid is scaffolding lesson objectives that are too similar because they'll argue that they've already done it. You could also use obvious timing cues like timer clocks and alarms or a metronome or something to allow them awareness of the slower pace needed to finish with quality in their work. Good luck.
