Using Artwork for Deep Thinking and Discovering Theme!

I've found one of the most challenging aspects of teaching literacy, especially to Special Education students or English Language Learners is finding and understanding the THEME or THE MEssage in a passage. Understanding theme is a higher order skill and requires students to make inferences in order to come away with the overall theme or message. Many times it's too abstract for students or they don't have the prior [cultural] knowledge of certain messages.  It becomes even more difficult if there are multiple themes woven throughout one text/passage.  However theme is an identified necessary skill as layed out by the Common Core Learning Standards:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.2 – Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas.

Some common themes we find in literature are:  honesty, acceptance, courage, perseverance, cooperation, compassion, kindness, responsibility, redemption, sacrifice, overcoming obstacles, and loyalty to name just a few.  

I've found that using art and paintings is a low-pressure way to help them identify and come away with THE BIG IDEA.  The idea is that through the art exploration students are doing the same work that mirrors the reading skills they are struggling with (including author’s craft, prediction, inferring, interpretation, monitoring for sense, making connections, synthesizing, etc.).  Instead of getting stuck on simply re-telling events students are encouraged to look close and deep at the paintings and pull out specific details to help them understand and analyze what is happening and being portrayed in the painting. 

The overall aim is for students to be able to look at a painting and make predictions and interpretations about the painting as well as come up with an idea as to the overall message the artist may be trying to teach.  Students then use evidence taken from the painting to support their ideas. The fun part is that I stress that there is no necessarily right or wrong answer. Students need to however, back up their ideas with details and evidence from the artwork. 

Ideas around some Sample Prompts I have used (with the incorporation of the reading skills):

Monitoring for sense/Envisioning prompt: What do you see? What are people doing, saying, thinking, or feeling?

Prediction prompt: What do you think is going to happen next? How do you know it? Give evidence that would help to support your idea.

Interpreting prompt: What is the message of this painting? What is the artist trying to teach us with this painting? What does the artist want us to learn with this painting? GIVE EVIDENCE

Taking it to the next level, after weeks of studying several different paintings, students are then asked to create their own paintings.  They are asked to consider while they planned out and created their piece what THEIR message in the painting would be. What did they want people to learn? What evidence will people find in their painting to help them make these interpretations?  

Below are some of the paintings I use to do this work:

Guernica, Pablo Picasso

American Gothic, Grant Wood. 

Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear, Vincent Van Gogh

 

Untitled, Keith Haring

Starry Night, Vincent Van Gogh

The Scream, Edvard Munch

Mona Lisa, Leonardo DaVinci

The Last Supper, Leonardo DaVinci

Activities to increase COURAGE & PERSEVERANCE in your classrooms...

Activities to increase

in your classrooms…

¶      Possible Read Alouds: The Little Engine that Could by Watty Piper, Free: Stories About Human Rights, The Story of Ruby Bridges by Robert Coles, Sheila Rae the Brave by Kevin Henkes, The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch, Thank You Mr. Falker by Patricia Polacco, Letters from Rifka by Karen Hesse, Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key by Kate DiCamillo, Amazing Grace by Mary Hoffman, Because of Winn Dixie by Kate DiCamillo, Wonder by R.J. Palacio, Playing with the Boys by Nicole Leigh Shepherd, I Love You Dude by Vladimir Radunksy, Estrela The Star by Nicolaas Lems, Wilma Unlimited by Kathleen Krull, The Recess Queen by Alexis O’Neill, The Sissy Duckling by Harvey Fierstein, Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, Kids With Courage by Barbara A. Lewis.

  

  

¶      Read Maya Angelou’s poem “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me” to your students. Have them change the words to fit their own life, write a new poem on the subject, or illustrate the poem with drawings or from pictures in a magazine.

¶      Do a biographical study on Helen Keller.  Afterwards, have students research and give presentations on what it means to be blind/deaf, how this would affect your life, and how people with disabilities are the same or different.  Also visit PBS Kids website, “You’ve Got Braille” at http://www.pbs.org/teachers/connect/resources/3872/preview/ to expose your students to forming letters in Braille.

¶      Check out the film “The Mighty Macs,” the true inspiring story about an obscure women’s basketball team having the courage to persevere through an unlikely championship season (found on Netflix instant watch).

¶      Have students create Power Point presentations around people in history who have persevered through difficult situations. Check out this video for inspiration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcXQoUZrJpU&sns=em

¶      Link “No Name Calling Week” into being a community of Courageous Upstanders: http://www.schoolclimate.org/bullybust/parents/upstander-behavior

¶      Create a helpful “Courageous Bystanders Chart” as a classroom community having students share 1) Most helpful Bystander Strategies (These made things better more often than they made things worse), 2) Neutral Strategies (These worked sometimes but sometimes made things worse), and 3) Least Helpful Bystander Strategies (These made things worse more often than they made things better).

¶      Have a “Perseverance Board Game Challenge” where students are encouraged to play strategy games like chess, checkers, monopoly, etc.

¶      Courage & Perseverance Recipes: Have students write out: “What ingredients do you need for Courage? Perseverance?”

¶      Link up with an older/younger grade and have a Book Buddies discussion around “The Tortoise and the Hare” where students can act out the story and create books together.

¶      Goal Setting: Have students create goals for the month and monitor their perseverance as they work towards achieving their goals.

Math Connection:

¶      Create a chart, bar graph, barometer, or scale on “How to Reach Perseverance.”

¶      Host a Math-A-Thon with your class where students are encouraged to not only build their stamina but persevere through possible difficult and challenging math problems.

Arts Connection:

¶      Have students create “Courage Badges” to remind themselves to be brave when they face an intimidating situation.

¶      Design a mobile! Use paper, string, & a clothes hanger to have students write four different areas or situations where courage and perseverance could be shown (ex. to peers, challenging situations, upcoming state tests, through a disability, etc.)

¶      Paper Crafts: Creating intricate crafts through origami, or paper weaving help to encourage perseverance!

¶      Create “Courage & Perseverance” masks. What does it look like?

¶      Draw the feeling of Courage or Perseverance. Create a character and expand into a cartoon or mini flip book.

¶      Have students create a rap, chant, or song on courage and perseverance.  Record and turn it into a class video or pod cast! (remember to get photo/video releases signed)

Teaching ELLs to Navigate Textbooks!

Teaching ELLs to Navigate Textbooks Effectively

By: Colorín Colorado (2010)

Knowing how to navigate a textbook effectively is an important part of a student's ability to access new content. Conversely, being unable to read and use a textbook is a major obstacle for students when presented with new material and concepts across the curriculum, especially if a class calls for extended independent reading and review of the textbook.

For English language learners (ELLs), learning how to use a textbook can be a powerful tool in increasing their comprehension of material in all of their academic work and particularly in the content areas. While it may seem to be a basic skill, ELLs may be students with:

• no formal educational experience
• extensive schooling in a different country
• long-term experience in the U.S. system for many years but with limited exposure to a mainstream curriculum.

In each of these cases, it is quite possible that the students don't have experience with the kinds of textbooks they will be using in a U.S. classroom, or that they haven't learned how use textbooks as a toold to support their learning.

The good news is that many textbooks — especially those designed for ELLs or struggling readers — contain elements that can be used to help preview new material before starting a lesson. Once students learn what these elements are and how they can be used, students can begin to preview content and build background knowledge independently in their classes on a regular basis.

In order to help you get started building this skill, this article offers some strategies for teaching the parts of a textbook, the organization of a chapter within a textbook, as well as a strategy for previewing content with a "chapter walk."

Part I: Teach students textbook and chapter elements

Textbooks

At the beginning of the school year, introduce students to the elements of their textbooks and how they can be used, such as:

• Cover
• Author
• Table of contents
• Glossary
• Index
• Appendices

Show students examples of these elements in their own books, and ask them questions that check their comprehension of the differences between these tools, such as:

• "I want to know which chapter is about whales. Where should I look for that information?"
• "I want to learn about killer whales. How can I find the right page number for that information?"
• "I want to know what 'spout' means. Where can I find that definition?"

In addition, be sure to point out the specific features of textbooks that your students are using (a bilingual glossary, for example), as well as content-related tools (the Periodic Table of Elements in a chemistry textbook). Provide students with examples of the ways those tools can be used.

Each time students begin using a new textbook, review the elements they have already learned and point out any different features or elements of the new book. You may wish to use an activity to review the different parts they have learned such as the worksheets in the Hotlinks.

Chapters

Once students have mastered the main parts of a textbook, they are ready to move on to the parts of the chapter that will aid their informational reading, such as:

• Titles
• Chapter objectives
• Headings and subheadings
• Vocabulary lists
• Bold print (key vocabulary in context)
• Captions
• Side bars
• Maps
• Graphs (Circle, pie, bar, picto-gram, etc.)
• Pictures
• Bullets
• Review questions
• Quizzes

Show students examples of these elements and talk about their function. What is the difference between a graph and a picture? What is the difference between a bullet point and a bold heading? Help students understand how these elements are used to organize text and to highlight important information. One way to do so is by providing a blank outline that students can fill in with key headings and topics.

Review these elements before each chapter, and be sure to point out these elements in other expository texts, assessments, or articles that students encounter.

Part II: Use a "chapter walk"

Now that students know the basics, they can begin to preview content more and more independently as the school year progresses by using a "chapter walk."

Step 1: Have students look for:

• the objectives of the chapter
• key vocabulary
• visual elements (pictures, maps, diagrams, and graphs)
• headings and subheadings
• captions.

Step 2: Based on what they find, ask students to predict what the chapter will be about.

Step 3: Guide students to some key concepts and vocabulary words by asking questions about their predictions (see example below).

Step 4: Ask students to share what they know about the chapter topics.

Step 5: As students get more practice with this technique, ask them to use the review questions at the end of the chapter to help them predict what they will learn before they begin to read.

An activity like this may take some time at first because it's time-consuming to teach. If you use it with regularity, however, it will become easier and quicker, and students will be able to do this on their own at the beginning of a new chapter.

From the Classroom: Teacher Example

In this example, Amber Prentice describes how she uses the chapter walk:

"When we get to a new chapter in the text, the first thing I do is to ask students to open their book to the first page of that chapter. I ask questions about what they will learn based on what they see on that page, such as 'What do you think this chapter is about? What do we know about that topic?' or 'What do you see in this picture?' Students offer their ideas, and I then ask them to take those ideas a step further so that we can begin to build background knowledge.

"In a unit about Native Americans in North America, my students looked at a picture that showed a couple Native American men in canoes, one with a net and fish at the bottom of the canoe. The students said, 'I see a boat, I see a man, I see a net, I see water, etc.' And I asked them what that taught them about Native Americans.

"After a few guesses, I asked them if they could guess what kind of food they ate. Right away they made the connection that the people in the picture ate fish. They also noticed the 'long boats,' and so I was able to introduce the word 'canoes.'"

As you move through these activities on a regular basis, students will become more confident with their ability to find information independently. Help student understand that this is a skill that they can use in all of their classes and that it will be very helpful to them throughout their academic career, especially as they get to more difficult courses and more difficult textbooks. They will appreciate the tools and skills you are giving them to learn and succeed!

Hot links

• Teach-nology.com: Using Parts of a Book (worksheets)
  These activities focus on the parts of a book such as the Table of Contents and Index.
• Parts of a Book (Riddles)
  These riddles from TeacherVision.com offer a good review for ELLs just learning new vocabulary words related to books.
• Text Features: Non-Fiction Printed Page vs. Website Format
  This chart from ReadWriteThink.org gives students a reference for comparing non-fiction textbook or printed material to website content features.
• Expository Text Structures and Signal Words
  This document posted by U-46 School District in Elgin, Illinois provides an overview of five expository text structures, associated signal words, and related graphic organizers.
• Text-Mapping Project
  Step-by-step lesson plan on how to map text with students.
• Non-fiction Text: Classroom Resources
  This packet includes some activities that can be used with students to help them identify text features and structures.