Today I attended the class “Teaching Book Arts to Young Children.” I was initially excited for this class because I was under the impression that we would be teaching kids, and I enjoy teaching a younger audience so much. However, the class was instead focused on different activities and methods that are helpful when teaching children book arts. This class turned out to be very useful to me, however! Many different projects and different forms of book arts were presented and explained. The Teacher, Ellen Ferrari, is a preschool art educator. She told me before class that she hadn’t taught adults in years and as such was a little nervous going into the class. However, she brought so much energy and skill to the classroom! She was absolutely wonderful and I hope I have the opportunity to work with her again in the future. I enjoyed her teaching style in particular because she was incredibly enthusiastic and bodily as she taught. For example; when she was explaining an M fold, Ellen bent her arms over her head to demonstrate how to bend the paper. Her years of experience showed through the way her demonstrations were more like performances, and she kept me fully engaged even though I was not completing the projects with the class. Ellen was also incredibly prepared and organized, each material she had the class use had its own dish that was laid out for them before class started. At the end of class, she simply stacked all of them together, which kept cleanup very easy. She also brought different books with project ideas, children’s storybooks, and learning games, all of which she used to give context to her projects.
