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Do you want to make your students'
work matter to them? Publish on the Internet! Create a class
website or teach them how to construct their own pages. Take
pictures and scan in their work. You'll see a huge investment
in quality as students realize that their work will be online
for friends and family to view.
Okay, I hear you. Now what?
Here are some projects I've used over the years with my students.
(Realize that I don't use all of them every year.) I've often
worked with the art teacher when I felt insecure about my art
skills, but art is not the point, here. Language Arts is the
emphasis.
Literature
> Setting - have
the students draw or paint settings
and watch them dive back into the text for details. Have them
generate maps and add
significant places
to make directional relationships clear, construct cross section
of houses or ships,
or use software to draw this on computers (my students use all
kinds of software, but Paint is readily available). Some students
love drawing architectural floor plans, and I've even had models
of settings made out of Leggos
and clay.
> Plots - let students story board plot, design Kamishibai,*
and construct graphic
novels and scrapbooks. Some students will love drawing and
designing a choose-your-own-adventure retelling on the computer,
hyperlinking the choices. If your students have access to videocams,
let them rewrite a book or short story as a movie script and
film it for screening at "Movie Night."
> Character
- let them make art museums to
illuminate character, create movie
posters and cast roles, draw sociograms to illustrate relationships,
create paper dolls with clothing for the characters, construct
artifacts (my students have made everything from real
phones covered with quotes for Georgia in Dancing in my Nuddy
Pants to using real jeans with character quotes written in fabric
paint for Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants), or make paper sculptures
with character information (one of the eerie experiences of my
life was the morning I walked into a darkened classroom filled
with life-sized stuffed paper people who were covered with quotations).
One very successful project was by a student who made all the
characters out of pipe cleaners, posed them in a scene from the
book, and decorated them with artifacts that symbolized their
essences.
Vocabulary -
> "All You Ever Wanted to Know and More"
vocabulary posters
- students draw a mnemonic picture for the word on one side of
the poster and the other contains everything the student can
find out about the word - first use, part of speech, definition,
paraphrased definition, antonym, synonym, etc.
> Illustrated word walls - traditional strips with
the words, but with drawings to illustrate them.
Grammar
> Parts of speech books - Ruth Heller has a stunning
series of parts of speech picture books, but I have student draw
and illustrate their own Pop-up
Preposition Books - students write a beast fable with a quest
and construct a pop-up book to illustrate directional prepositional
phrases.
Writing
> Reacting to art - show them transparencies of
works of art and let them discover how the artist creates mood.
Generate word lists that describe that mood. Have them write
good leads that match the painting or sculpture. Discuss how
to present a character from a painting with show/not tell. Ask
the students to make up plots for possible short stories involving
the scene in the picture.
> Use a Life Map (maps of the student's neighborhood/house
with places where significant events happened marked) to make
a "story bank" for workshop.
> Pass out postcards
and ask them to write as a character in the picture.
Poetry
> Use three
dimensional constructs as the vehicle for poems (as demonstrated).
> Have the students make Personality
Posters as an introduction to your class ("I Am"
Poem, Biopoem, and "My Soul" poems in a collage).
> Visual poetry like concrete poems really excite
students who are less than thrilled to be writing poems.
Once students understand the value of art,
I often ask my students to write up their own proposals, and
their creativity continuously amazes me.
A wonderful culminating project for integrating
art and literature is an multigenre project. I can't speak highly
enough of this project. For details, see Tom Romano's books on
the subject, and for an example of online multigenre projects,
see some of my students' work at www.gretchenle.com.
Enjoy!
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