Check out this blog post from Judy Cuthbertson on Seedlings Educators Collaborative about creating a sense of community within the classroom based on creativity and uniqueness. Second grade teacher Ms. Matican says: “It has helped develop a sense of community, an appreciation and respect for each person’s unique qualities and voice, and a comfort in taking risks, knowing thoughts and ideas will be accepted and appreciated.”
Poetry is one of our oldest image-makers. Words paint. Readers imagine the world of the text. What if we tapped into this visual process and redirected the output? What if we began asking readers to ‘give us a picture’ of what they ‘see’ as they read?
What do these words see? And later, how might words show a place or an emotion?
Poetry attempts to alter our perception through words. By asking students to draw what they see in a passage or a chapter we bring them into the poetic process. Creating a classroom where these drawings are shared and discussed situates each member of the class as an image-maker. By establishing various drawing activities within the study of the language arts we encourage students to explore other versions of ‘image-making’. The imagination has another platform. Students have access and place to continue the conversation.
In class students discussed their planning (“pre-writing”) for their design as well as their hopes (the effect on the audience). Everyone had words to add. Later in writing they pursued this question: In what ways did the activity alter or enhance your understanding of the passage or reading itself? You may discuss your own work or work of your peers.
For the assignment the students chose a passage from their reading to draw and provide ‘a visual reading of the passage’. The examples below are from three different sections of the text we were reading at the time (The Odyssey). One student wrote later that the assignment was the most difficult of the unit “because we had to draw a picture of what was going on in the chapter and I didn’t really have a good understanding of the chapter that we had to draw which made it tough.”
–James Shivers
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.”
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!
Check out the Museum Questions: Reflections on Museums, Programs, and Visitors blog here. The blog “is dedicated to questions about museums and thoughts on creating a reflective practice.” The creator has some great insight into museum education and school visits to museums from her fifteen years of experience in various museum education departments.
“The Educational Value of Field Trips,” an article and study done by faculty and researchers at the University of Arkansas offers some enlightenment into the benefits of school visits to cultural institutions like a museum. Using the newly opened Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, researchers were able to gauge the impact a museum experience had on students of all ages. Here is what they discovered:
“Students randomly assigned to receive a school tour of an art museum experience improvements in their knowledge of and ability to think critically about art, display stronger historical empathy, develop higher tolerance, and are more likely to visit such cultural institutions as art museums in the future.”
Check out the full article here.
After many years in education, it has finally occurred to me that I really need to market the idea of reading and writing to my remedial reading
students. Reading and writing has always been difficult for them and at the ripe old age of 9, they don't choose either as free time activities.
Despite my encouragement of, “practice will make you better” or my pleas:“you’d never say this to your football (basketball/soccer/dance etc) coach," reading and writing remain on the NOT TO DO list for these children.
So, I decided that I would bring sketch books back to the reading room this year. My goal: Let the kids discover for themselves that they ARE creative and DO have great powers of observation and ideas. For the first 15 minutes of each reading class, the students sketch, write and share ideas.
Guess what??? They LIKE it! They are beginning to buy into the idea that they are smart…just in a different way from some of their peers.
Very quickly, after the first 3 sessions, I had students requesting sketching/writing time. In the beginning, I collected images from the YCBA collection, book illustrations, and online images from various art museums. I am storing them in what is becoming a rather large power point. Each slide is an image with several writing invitations.
Van Gogh: Shoes 1888
Students sketch and write for equal amounts of time.
JWMTurner; The Morning After Deluge 1843
Two important observations over the past month:
1) Kids get right to the writing. Not one student (grade 3-5) has uttered the dreaded words, “I don’t know what to write.” Or better yet, “How many sentences does this have to be?”
2) The kids are starting to notice that their writing is getting longer and more detailed. There is pride in their voices when they share. They are excited with the language they are using and making links to literature. They are applying figurative language and making inferences (and actually know what both of those terms mean now!)
Teacher note:
This takes very little planning. Just give students time and opportunity and they will amaze you and, more importantly, amaze themselves.
I sketch and write with my students to model and practice what I preach.
In The New York Times article, “Writer Brings in the World While She Keeps It at Bay,” Julie Bosman sits down with novelist Donna Tartt to talk about her latest book, The Goldfinch. Here is what she had to say about her experience with images and writing:
“Taking copies of National Geographic, she would cut out pictures of a zebra or a child, and write a story about the picture. “I wrote books in this way, around images,” Ms. Tartt said, something that didn’t occur to her until “The Goldfinch” — a book that surrounds an image of a luminous yellow-tinged bird — was complete.”
One of our goals here at the Yale Center for British Art is to encourage teachers and students to make these connections between image and writing on a daily basis. Novelist Donna Tartt encapsulates this goal with her novel centered around a Dutch painting. Take a look at this article and see how art has influenced this successful writer. You can also buy a copy of The Goldfinch here.
The book Twilight Comes Twice by Ralph Fletcher, illustrated by Kate Kiesler is a wonderful book to use in conjunction with our Clouds and Skies Pinterest Board (found here).
This book, through eloquent text and lush paintings, explores the magic of dusk and dawn. Fletcher’s text is simple and accessible to children, yet rich in its imagery:
“With invisible arms
dawn erases the stars
from the blackboard of night.
Soon just the moon
and a few stars
remain.”
The illustrations are equally appealing. The pages depict common daily activities such as early morning walks, streetlights flickering off and spiders rousing themselves from the night. The colors are calming; yet evoke all the senses as we remember the special time that passes ever so briefly each day. Use the images provided on Pinterest to compare and contrast with the words and images in the book.
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
A salient feature of strong reading is ‘picturing’, a fostering of words to create a visual terrain in our heads. We stroll along in a story, adding detail after detail, slowly shaping, ‘drawing’, or seeing a room, a chair, and conversation. We hear the words in what we imagine. We abstract from letters, worlds. A process in time. A skill in need of practice. As teachers we want to cultivate this participation, this move from letters on the page to figures in our minds.
How might a visual activity bring to light the power of words, the power of participation? Even in the 19th Century in our School Readers and Primers we wove together words and images, picturing and story, seeing and telling. Here’s one example from a Appletons’ School Readers Third Primer (1887).
