Starting the year with Artist Trading Cards...

   Each summer I wonder what kind of task to send along in the welcome letter for students. I like tasks that are inviting, that give an impression of what we will do together in the coming year without being too cumbersome or daunting.

   Last summer we sent Squiggles, which were fun. Each student received a squiggle, which they could decorate as they wished. The students brought their squiggle drawings to school on the first day to share. We loved seeing how the students all took the same beginning shapes and created imaginative designs!

   At the end of this school year, our art teacher organized an Artist Trading Card session for the last day of school. Students had been making cards all year, and each had a handful to share. Caught up in the usual end-of-year flurry, I only made three. Of course the kids all wanted to trade with me and I didn't have enough to trade with everyone.

  This year, then, we decided to start with the trading cards! Each student will get two blank cards in the welcome to school letter. I've been spending summer days doodling away on cards to send along in each envelope. Each student will get one completed card and two blanks, all for trading (or not) on the first day of school.

    It hasn't been as daunting a task as I thought. In fact, the cards are the perfect size for quick doodles and experiments, and have given me a purpose for trying out techniques and looking at my garden in a new way.

   Daylilies are fun:

 Last year's students all liked the fountain doodle, so I've made a few variations. This is a very old style for me, first perfected around the notes from my tenth grade World History class.

 
Yesterday a new image crept into my drawing. Oh, no! What is this? Fall leaves? An impossible schoolhouse?

   Oh, well. Fall can't come too soon--I still have 20+ cards to make.

Notes
-Have you tried Frolyc yet? I have lots of my texts posted there. It's an easy way to quickly publish content to student iPads.
-If you also have September on your mind, you may want to go ahead and check out my September reading homework packets. Four high-interest texts with parent-friendly directions, comprehension questions, and vocabulary activities.
-Teaching About Theme is a great set of activities for the beginning of the year. Multi-level stories and activities are all focused on the topic of theme.
-I've made several revisions to my pack Text-Based Inferences and More. Included is an interactive PowerPoint modeling the inference making process, assessments, and the kid-friendly Max Mission passages.

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Reading, Visual Imagery, and STEM

I'm fascinated by exploring how readers tie together words on a page and images in their heads. Drawings really help to show a teacher what students are imagining as they read and how they are building mental models. (You can see this Visualizing Assessment for an example.)  Sketch-to-stretch is one of my favorite content area reading strategies.

In his chapter in the book Literacy in the Arts Gary Woolley writes, "Imagining story ideas during reading links information in working memory and makes the encoding and recall of information more efficient." I've seen this with my students as they read both narrative and expository texts--drawing pictures and attaching new vocabulary to concepts help students to go beyond shallow surface processing.

It's interesting to see how this plays out in the real classroom. To get ready for our cavern field trip, we read a text about caverns. Students first drew what they thought caverns look like. This picture is pretty typical--a few cave features, lots of lovely artwork, but nothing that shows how caverns form or what they might be like inside.

Then students read a text about caverns. Interestingly, they did not spontaneously go back to their original drawings to add more. It took a great deal of prompting on my part to encourage the groups of students to go back to their pictures: "Do you know the names of some of the cavern features now? What could you add to your cavern picture?"

On Monday, we went on our field trip to the cavern. I felt the power of the preparation when students gasped as they went in: "Oh, Mrs. Kissner! It's beautiful!"

The words that had been lacking after the reading selection were being used now, even before they were introduced by the tour guide. "Is that flowstone? I think it is."

"Mrs. Kissner, where is the limestone?"

"I feel the water! I'm going to grow rocks on me!"

"Oh, which are the ones that grow down? Stalac somethings."

It was a really neat experience and really enhanced by the students' interest. When we returned to school on Wednesday, then, I wanted to take the time to process what we had done.

"Let's go back to our cavern drawings," I started to say. But then something changed. Maybe it's seeing all the awesome projects in my Twitter feed, maybe it's my experience with STEM club--I changed the task from "Let's draw a cavern" to "Let's find a way to create a cavern."

Kids started to collaborate, forming loose groups. Some students did created drawings, but they were rich, multi-layered affairs, with keys to symbols and labels. Other students turned to paper engineering. How could you make a cavern out of construction paper? It became quite the engineering challenge as students experimented with rulers and cardboard to create three-dimensional scenes. Luckily I had a parent volunteer in for the morning, so she helped as I pulled out more materials (aluminum foil! wax paper! rubber bands! Playmobil people!) and engaged students in conversation about what they were doing.

Here are some products:

The second cave experienced a real-life sinkhole, as the house caused the whole thing to sink in at first. "Mrs. Kissner! It fell apart!" This was a great connection to sinkholes, which I was going to teach about anyway, so it was a very productive setback. I pulled everyone together for a few minutes after music class to talk about the sinkhole and show some videos of how they look in the real world.

On the other side of the room, I was worried about one group that had a cup of water. Then they explained: "The cave that we went to had a room that was carved by water and an underground lake, so we're putting an underground river in ours."

It was interesting to see how they dealt with the task of creating a cave in three dimensions, and how this task allowed them to explore the concept in new ways. Their creations were different from the typical "class project" in that their products were not uniformly beautiful, but all showed some learning.

 I'm wondering:
-What details about this task will stick with kids in 3 weeks, 3 months, 3 years? What big ideas will they remember about caverns?
-What STEM concepts did they learn while working on their caverns?
-How did the real life experience and the reading interact?
-Luckily, I had started packing away some books for the end of the year, and so I had some empty shelf space for temporary cave display. But what will I need to do next year to make room for these kinds of projects?

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Help for Word Callers: Using Drawings

Last time, I wrote about how manipulatives can help readers who can decode words, but are having trouble with comprehension. Drawing can be another way to reach these readers and help them to build elaborate mental models.

For a long time, I felt that using drawing during reading class was--well, cheating. How can something that kids like so much be beneficial? I worried that kids would become so focused on creating pictures that they would not make much meaning from the text.

But drawing is a great strategy for all readers. When readers try to make a picture to represent the ideas in a text, they have to think about those ideas in a new way. Here are some ways to help students--and especially those with poor comprehension--build meaning.

Coach students as they draw
In a review of research on drawing as a learning technique, Peggy Van Meter and Joanna Garner found that strategies that include some instructional coaching are especially helpful. I like to do this with students as we read sections of text that are rich in setting details. Using the Promethean board or a piece of chart paper, I'll show students how I take details from the text and put them into my picture.

As I help students draw to represent ideas from the text, I try to highlight the relationships between items as well as key vocabulary.

Don't put down your own drawing ability!
Once, as I was drawing a sketch on the chalkboard, I offhandedly said to students, "I'm not a good artist." No sooner had the words come out of my mouth than I realized what a mistake they were. I wouldn't want kids to say, "I'm not a good reader," and then quit trying.

So I changed my words. I said, "Wait--that's not what I meant. This picture didn't come out very well. Let me look back at the text, think about the details, and try again."

Use content area texts
Content area texts can be a challenge to readers. Drawing can help them to understand how ideas fit together. When my students were reading about caves, they finished the reading by creating a picture and labeling the formations with vocabulary words from the text. This activity required the kids who had skipped quickly through the text to go back and reread the sentences that described the different formations. The task of drawing caused them to realize that their comprehension was not what it should have been!