YCBA Gallery Visit with 3rd and 4th Graders, by Darcy Hicks

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Five teachers from the Read School in Bridgeport, CT brought their students to the Yale Center for British Art last week, as part of their Visual Literacy partnership. They were divided into groups and headed off into the galleries with their parent chaperones and their group leaders (either a docent, their teacher or myself). Each group visited two paintings, and discussed what they saw in the paintings as well as what they thought might be happening.

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The children were equipped with pencils and their sketch journals, which they have been using in the classroom for drawing and writing as they engage in Visual Literacy. They drew what they saw in the paintings into their sketch journals. Drawing the paintings forces them to observe carefully and they see things they would have missed. As Donald Graves said, “We see with our hands.”

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There are a number of things that happen when children talk about paintings. First, as they tell what they see, they share and build vocabulary at a rate I never see in other conditions. One child says “The horse has a seat on his back,” and another says, “It’s a saddle.” I kept notes as they shared new words, but could barely keep up!

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The other thing that always surprises me is the easy connections they make to these paintings, which at first glance seem so distant from their lives today. Looking at these scenes allows the children to share their own previous knowledge and life experiences with each other. One little girl said, “I think it’s morning because the sun is shining some pink, and that’s what I see in the morning.” When describing a dog in a hunting scene, a little boy said, “I think he’s trembling because he is about to enter the woods and woods are dark.” Note the vocabulary: words like “trembling” catch the attention of us teachers, who are often surprised that they know these words.

For the last half-hour of our visit, the children met in the Library Court and wrote in their journals about what they saw. They were given choices for writing. Some told a story about a painting, others described it. Some also chose to write from the perspective of one of the people or animals in the paintings. A few wrote poems.

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"The sky is blue and the sun is out. It is a sunny day. I'm feeding my horse Pumpkin. But then I began to sweat. It's humid outside. I see the clouds reflecting in the sparkly lake."
“The sky is blue and the sun is out. It is a sunny day. I’m feeding my horse Pumpkin. But then I began to sweat. It’s humid outside. I see the clouds reflecting in the sparkly lake.”

The kids are learning to live in the paintings, and write from there.

"It looks like the horse is trying to turn away because the lion is trying to kill the horse. And the lion is biting his neck and that makes the horse not to breath. And his mouth is open trying to breath. And if I was in that painting I would hear the loud roar and last but not least I would hear him running!"
“It looks like the horse is trying to turn away because the lion is trying to kill the horse. And the lion is biting his neck and that makes the horse not to breath. And his mouth is open trying to breath. And if I was in that painting I would hear the loud roar and last but not least I would hear him running!”

These journal entries are seeds for all sorts of writing: personal narratives, poems, stories, informative essays, expository pieces, etc. The paintings are the bridge to their authentic topics and voices.

The Visual Word

Having established a journal practice in class, I found multiple ways of using it for day to day assignments.  One advantage of the journal is archival.  Students begin with their work at the beginning of the year and keep adding to the pages as the year progresses.  They can look back, refer to their previous work, re-read and use as a source. Students have a record of their ongoing learning, an archive.

The assignment here was to place image work along side their word-work. I don’t do this with every set of vocabulary words.  As a visual literacy strategy, the word and the understanding spill into the experience of learning. Later, the student can look back and ‘see’ what they know. As is the case with drawing and designing, they often feel the urge to re-vise both.  I ask the students for context, part of speech, definition, an example, and a visual.

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Students learn words live in contexts with a narrative.  Students create a unique iconography and links outside the text. The word then has a visual component along side a link outside the reading.  Since the goal is practice and exploration, I can look at their work as a process of knowing and be flexible in my assessments. As their language use expands from ongoing practice in various modalities, students find more nuanced ways of communication. As their journal becomes an archive they see a residue of their growth or even see places where change is necessary. They continue to learn on their own.

–James Shivers

Cultivating the Desire to Write: Teacher and Students Journaling Together

Kindergartener journaling in Daron Cyr's class
Kindergartener journaling in Daron Cyr’s class 

What if kids were exposed to writing in the same way a trailer exposes us to a movie that isn’t out yet? How do we create that feeling of anticipation, so that rather than force-feeding our lessons, we are quenching their thirst to communicate?

At the Brennan Rogers Magnet School in New Haven, Daron Cyr sits with her twenty-five kindergarteners on the rug, gazing up at a Smartboard image of Renoir’s painting The Umbrellas. Daron says, “Remember, we read a painting like we read a book.” She tells them to take a Think Minute: “Our eyes are on the painting. I want to know what you see, but also tell me the story that you see. Put your thumbs up when you’re ready.”

The children take turns sharing their thoughts about the painting. They focus on the weather, the characters, the details, what’s going to happen next. After a while Daron asks them to get their sketch journals. They make choices about where to sit, what art materials to use, and whether to copy the painting or make a picture of something the painting made them think of from their own lives. There is no scribbling, there are no blank pages, and the noise in the room is from the kids talking about their pictures, sharing and building vocabulary: pre-writing at its best. I record their quiet chatter in my own journal: “These are the ladders on the playground, and this is where the water goes down the slide.” “It was raining and I saw a rainbow.” “She’s wearing her party dress.” At the end, they share their work by having a Gallery Walk.

If you’ve tried this kind of lesson – especially with a challenging class of 25 four- and five-year olds – you may know how easily it can fall apart (I certainly do). Afterwards, my burning question for Daron was, “How did you introduce their journals to them?” She picked up her own journal, saying, “I started by sharing mine.” Before giving her students their own, Daron spent weeks enthusiastically showing her kids pages of drawings and writing from her own journal. She also uses her journal in class, to scribe what her students say to her, often reading their words back to them. By the time Daron gave them their own journals, “they were so excited. They knew how important they were.”

 

"Capturing the every day" from Daron's journal
“Capturing the every day” from Daron’s journal

 

"Playground" from a kindergartener's journal
“Playground” from a kindergartener’s journal

By sharing her journal with her students, Daron is teaching the most important message to children about writing: that their thinking can be captured, recorded, and shared. This is giving her tiny students the most important ingredient for writing: the desire and anticipation to be a part of the writing world.

Do you have experiences with a sketch journal to share? Please post in comments!

Sky Lessons: Using Paintings to Teach Setting

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Illustration from Cloud Dance by Thomas Locker

 

“The sky settles everything – not only climates and seasons but when the earth shall be beautiful.”

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

The background of a painting is much like a setting in writing: it pulls you in, and puts you somewhere specific. We tell our students that “setting” is the time and place in a piece of writing. But it is more than that: it is an anchor for the reader. I like teaching setting by focusing on the sky. The sky is a great equalizer: we all see it, at all times of day and night, in all kinds of weather. It affects our moods and our actions. The collection of  paintings selected by Sara Torkelson in this pinterest board are a perfect way to show students of all ages how powerful the sky can be.

Continue reading Sky Lessons: Using Paintings to Teach Setting

Why Making Pictures Should Be Part of the Writing Process

 

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When a teacher makes the decision to bring art materials into the classroom and actually devote precious writing time to making art, that teacher is showing two things: 1. courage, and 2. a clear understanding of what makes a good writer. Susan Sontag said, “A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.” We ask children to use “visual imagery” in their writing on a daily basis. We tell them to “paint a picture with words.” The one thing we often forget, however, is how abstract words are for children, and how little experience they actually have with writing them down.

Words are a second language to all of us, if you consider the pictures in our minds to be our first language. When I ask you to remember your favorite childhood toys, do you picture the words “slinky” and “Legos?” More likely, you picture a silver coil climbing down the steps, and multi-colored blocks snapping together. As adults, we barely notice the steps we take to describe the pictures in our heads with words. But for children, the task of translating what they are thinking about into words is a challenge. Add to that the added task of forming the letters and sounding out the spelling, and you are asking for a lot of invisible steps to be taken.

Allowing time for making pictures in the writing classroom gives students – and teachers – the opportunity to see what they want to write. This provides opportunities for building vocabulary (“What do you call that color?” “What time of day is this taking place?” “Will you write about that moon?”). It also invests the students in their work, so that they desire success. It’s not always easy to get a student to describe what she wants to write, but ask her to describe her drawing and it is a different story. The time a teacher invests in allowing students to draw (before – not after – writing with words) is more than made up for when the students’ words flow more easily and confidently. Drawing loosens up the inhibitions, opens the lines of communication, and gives the student a voice.

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 “In my  picture I see a yellow spider resting on a cool leaf. The leaf touches the moonlight and the stars. The wind dancing with the sky suddenly dies down into a cool winter breeze. Good night sleeping yellow spider.”

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