Reading Writing
Reading
- Enhance critical thinking. While reading a story, students draw, sketch, or paint whatever is most vivid to them. It could be a color, a mood, an image, a symbol, a scene, or an idea. In small groups, they discuss their artwork and its significance to the story, and what they think will happen by the end.
- Stimulate analytical thinking and imaginative interpretation. Work with the children to create a chamber theater piece out of a short story. Ask them to select the most important scenes and explain why they chose them. Choose students to be narrators and others to speak and act the parts of the characters.
- Sharpen awareness of motivation and points of view. Children choose a conflict, issue, or problem raised by the text and stage a debate, with different students assuming the role of specific characters.
Writing
- Stimulate novel ideas for stories. Provide visual catalysts (e.g., paintings, photographs) for students to imagine what happened before and after the scenes depicted. Use the visual image as the climactic moment of a story, the moment after the climax, or the moment before it.
- Undertake investigative research. Children read a story of a painting that disappeared and imagine how they — the art detectives — tracked it down. Or they can write a fictional piece on how they discovered a painting and exposed the forgeries. What gave it away?
- Explore multiple points of view. As an extension of the previous activity, the students could write historical fiction about the extraordinary journey of the Mona Lisa from King Louis XIV's palace in Versailles to its permanent home in the Louvre. (They could also choose another famous art piece.) They could write it from the point of view of the painting, the people who had it, or the people who were looking for it.
- Synthesize different sources for a news story. Drawing on a variety of sources (photographs, paintings, music, and written material), children write a sketch, poem, script, or essay about a current event reported in the paper. The children then tell their story from a variety of viewpoints: this individual's friend, teacher, mother or father, sister or brother, or the family dog.
- Analyze a music composition (e.g., classical, rock, folk) and create a short script that follows the tone, pace, movements, etc. of this music. Students select a piece of music, listen to the different instruments and elements, and assess how the music could be a conversation.
Top