Visual Summaries

Reading Shakespeare is a challenge.  Yet, with an annotated text, students find their way.  Along with the normal strategies of reading an old text, in an unusual language, I have also explored using visual literacy skills to enhance meaning and explore the progression of the story.

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Drawing and working with visual mediums as a regular practice affords many opportunities to work on critical and creative skills in order to develop insight, awareness, understanding, and enhance articulation.

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For this exercise, I asked students to make a visual design of the particular act. A design that communicates both the meanings of the play, but also their interpretations and understandings of the play’s story.

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I encourage students to pay attention to the page design, to incorporate place, subjects, people, even conversation that seems significant.  I also suggested that they create a visuals that will tell the story but also remind them of their reading experience. The page becomes a canvas of visual knowledge, open to any arrangement that is meaningful to them. The journal without lines gives us this freedom. A freedom they completely explore. The page in the journal becomes a composition and like all the images we view, discuss and draw, a visual medium awaiting discovery and dialogue.

–James Shivers

Primarily Mondrian

Hallie Cirino, 5’s Teacher, CHT Preschool, Westport, CT

My co-teacher, Sylvia Grannan, and I were a bit surprised that some of our students were still unsure of shape names by this time in the school year. A geometry unit was in order, and immediately Sylvia thought of Piet Mondrian. After displaying some of his paintings, the children made observations of Mondrian’s work:

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Sadie, who has lived in NYC remarked, “It looks like apartment buildings and elevators.” Most of the other children noticed the concrete elements: colors, shapes, and lines. In truth, as we set out to find biographical information on Mondrian, we found that both he and the analysis of his work are so esoteric that it’s difficult to teach the children about the artist. However, we seized the opportunity to emphasize primary colors.

One day, Sylvia had the children close their eyes and said, “Imagine red. Just think about red.” The room was more or less silent for a minute or so, as our 5-year-olds pondered red. Sylvia gave the children a blank sheet of white paper and asked them to illustrate what they saw, and then write about it.

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The children shared their results at circle time and then decided to put it all together into a class poem:

Red Is:

By the Unicorn Class, March 2014

Red is a face,

Red is a volcano erupting,

Red is anger,

Red is a zipper,

Red is butterflies,

Red is fire,

Red is our class color,

Red is a ladder,

Red is a sun,

Red is a meteor.

It was such a successful process; we did the same for yellow and blue. In addition, at the art center, we put out black electrical tape, and tempera paints in the primary colors. We found small, stiff canvasses, and the children went to town, taping their canvasses with vertical and horizontal lines and painting the resulting quadrangles. Here’s a display of several together:

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Clouds and Skies

 

“Blue needs sun,

Without it,

Blue hides.

Then,

suddenly,

sparkling spring sky!”

-Joyce Sidman, Excerpt from Red Sings from Treetops, A Year in Colors

 

Check out our newest Pinterest post about Clouds and Skies here! This is just a small sample of the many works that showcase the natural world around us. Check out the clouds and skies using our online collection here and here. There are various options for using these works in the classroom; stay tuned to our blog to see how other teachers have used our collection of clouds and skies at the YCBA in their classrooms. How will you use these artistic expressions of nature? Share with us your own ideas about Clouds and Skies in the classroom.

 

Here are some books for all ages that can easily accompany one of the Pinterest posts:

Birds, Kevin Henkes. Illustrated by Laura Dronzek.

Little Cloud, Eric Carle.

Red Sings from Treetops: A Year in Colors, Joyce Sidman. Illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski.

Once Upon a Cloud, Rob D. Walker. Illustrated by Matt Mahurin.

It Looked Like Spilt Milk, Charles G. Shaw.