Viewing Like a Writer: The Art of the Week

The Common Core State Standards ask students to closely examine multiple types of texts. This includes informational articles and excerpts from literary works, but it can also include visual texts, such as paintings, sculptures, charts, graphs, or infographics (to name a few). I teach students to analyze visual media by incorporating an "Art of the Week" assignment for the final quarter of the school year. Below you will see what my assignment sheet looks like (left) and an example of how to "mark up" (or annotate) an image (right), which I share with my students. 

Original Document (in color) and Annotated Sample for Students (Photocopy). Collage Created with Fotor.com

THE PROCESS
First, I select works of art that I feel students should know, but may not already be familiar with: Klimt's The Kiss, Fuseli's The Nightmare, Wyeth's Christina's World. (I'm a scholar bowl coach, so I selected several works of art from NAQT's "You Gotta Know" list.) For this assignment, I want students' first impressions. I don't want students to begin the assignment with much background knowledge.

First, I select works of art that I feel students should know, but may not already be familiar with: Klimt's The Kiss, Fuseli's The Nightmare, Wyeth's Christina's World. (I'm a scholar bowl coach, so I selected several works of art from NAQT's "You Gotta Know" list.) For this assignment, I want students' first impressions. I don't want students to begin the assignment with much background knowledge.

I project the image of the artwork on my whiteboard and give students a couple of minutes to take it all in. Then, we begin annotating. I ask them to label what they see: people, objects, colors, and textures. I also ask them to list the emotions that the work evokes. We spend about five minutes just recording our "noticings." Then, I invite students to share as part of a whole group discussion, although this would work well as a Think-Pair-Share activity, too. Students are allowed to "borrow" observations that they like and want to use to supplement their own, as long as they also contribute to the group list. (Think of it as the "Take a Penny-Leave a Penny" jar at a cash register.)

After students are finished with their annotations, then the fun begins: writing! We have a brief discussion regarding inferences and using textual support. Students are given the prompt to write the narrative of the artwork: you have the story in visual form; now translate the story into words. Generally, responses can vary greatly and there is no "wrong" answer, as long as the narrative can be supported by the text.

This is one of those assignments that really polarizes my students: they either love it or hate it. Some students love the chance to be creative, while others beg to have the structure of the nonfiction article of the week return. Student enthusiasm can also vary based on the artwork you provide them with. For the final Art of the Week of the year, I allowed students to choose their own work of art to analyze, and the results were really great! Almost everyone completely the assignment--with great effort--and the results were very entertaining!

Note: Need more 'Core? Add optional language requirements for more rigor: clauses, phrases, semicolons, MLA formatting, etc.

Interactive Grammar: How I Use Writing Brushstrokes in My Classroom

For me, teaching grammar is a struggle. I know that my students need to know some of the basics if I want them to become better writers, writers who can manipulate clauses and phrases to produce different effects. But I also know that teaching "grammar for grammar's sake" is not an effective approach. Students don't make the connection between endless packets of worksheets--asking them to underline subjects once and verbs twice--and writing. They don't transfer those skills when it comes time to put pen to paper and make some magic. 

So, how do we, as teachers, make that connection visible? That's the question. 

I've been researching books on grammar pedagogy for a few years now, and my personal favorites are Jeff Anderson's Mechanically Inclined, Robert Cahill's Stack the Deck, and Harry Noden's Image Grammar, the latter which I am going to talk about today.

What I really like about Noden's approach is that it is so visual. He draws an analogy between the way a painter paints (using various brush strokes to create interest) and the way a writer writes (using various grammatical structures to create interest). To me, the analogy makes so much sense. After all, aren't we, as writers, trying to help our readers visualize our setting, our characters, our argument?Noden introduces five basic "brush strokes" of writing, which are the foundation of grammar instruction in my classroom: adjectives out-of-order, appositives, absolutes, participial phrases, and vivid action verbs. All of these concepts are mentioned in my grade-level Common Core standards, so Image Grammar is an approach that you can really get behind and get district support for. Also, once you've covered the basics, Noden provides plenty of ways that you can up the rigor and have students super-charge their writing.

Today, I'm sharing my Brush Stroke Notes. (Just click on the hyperlink to access them as a PDF file.) I created them using Power Point. Visually, they are very simple, but they print nice and clean on colored paper, or white paper for students to color or highlight. I print them out with two slides per sheet, and they end up being the perfect size for cutting out and gluing into an interactive notebook! 

Above left, is a copy of the "Vivid Action Verbs" notes printed on purple computer paper and added to a notebook. The empty space below the notes was used for students to list action verbs from a book or short story, and to create their own exemplar sentence using some of the best verbs that they found. Above center, you can see a sample of how to use the "Adjectives out of Order" page. I had students color-code their adjectives and the nouns they modify, in both the sample from the notes and in their own writing sample. Above right, you can see a sample "Absolute Phrase" page, where students learn the basics of building absolutes with a sentence construction chart, before introducing more complex versions of the absolute phrase.

If you already use Noden's Image Grammar, I hope that these will help you and your students. If you don't already know about Noden's approach to grammar, I highly recommend that you go to Amazon and buy Image Grammar right now. It really will transform the way you teach grammar!

BANISH BORING SENTENCES! My Favorite Grammar Exercise

Sometimes I think of grammar as a "necessary evil." It's typically not fun to teach, mostly because students would rather watch paint dry than identify nouns and verbs. I remember spending countless hour in seventh grade diagramming sentences on the board. Luckily, grammar came fairly easily to me, so the grammar unit in every year of school after that was a time that I could sit back and "coast." But I know that I was one of the few. I know plenty of adults who shudder at the thought of subject-verb agreement, or second guess their choice of who verses whom.

I think it's necessary to make grammar relevant.  My preferred method of grammar instruction is to deliver a concentrated dose of grammar in the form of a mini-lesson, followed by writing application. Students might argue that they will never need grammar again, but I haven't had many tell me that they won't need to write well after high school. 

One of my favorite mini-lessons involves replacing forms of the verb "to be" with more specific action verbs. I have a set of "boring sentence" cards that I made, printed, and laminated. (You can grab them in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.) I pass them out to students and then I ask them to show, rather than tell what the card is saying. For example, one of my favorite cards is "The chihuahua was scary."

I point out that the sentence contains a form of to be: was. It would be a much more interesting read if we were showed the dog was scary, rather than just being told. (After all, if someone told me they saw a scary chihuahua, I would want proof!) As a class, we brainstorm details that would show us that the chihuahua is scary: Are his eyes bulging? Is he foaming at the mouth? Did he just chase off the Mastiff down the street? Once students have the hang of it, I turn them loose to expand their one-liners into detail-oriented paragraphs. If we have time, we share some of our paragraphs. Students like trying to guess the original sentence each of their classmates was given.

What is your favorite grammar lesson? Leave your answer in the comments!