You know how much I love paint chips. They are beautiful, inspiring, plentiful and free. I've already told you about Paint Chip Poetry. Let's make something festive for the classroom. How about some mini all-about-me collages to string into garlands?
Swing by Lowes for the Valspar paint chips that come with three colors and three squares cut from the bottom edge. Haul out your Magazine Mountain. Get the scissors, glue and twine or ribbon.
Here's the tricky part. Students will need to keep their chips color side up but with the three holes along the top of their collage. This is where the twine will go to string the art. Someone in each class will probably assemble his upside down. It happens.
My preference is for the collage to contain words and images and not extend up to the top third of the chip. I like to see a little bit of the colors they chose. and I need room to thread the collages. Also, no ratty edges from magazine pictures extending over the side of the chip, please. Names can go on the back, since it's easy to flip the chip and see what's what.
This is a great beginning or end of year activity. It's also a relaxing respite from a week of state testing. Teens need the opportunity to express themselves...and see themselves in their learning spaces.
The most effective graphic organizer I have found to help students write about place comes from Wisconsin. More specifically, from Wisconsin's super-amazing-blow-your-mind cartoonist and author LYNDA BARRY. I had to shout it. I had to. I did.
I first fell in love with the mind of Lynda Barry while reading One!Hundred!Demons! If I could travel back in time to 13, I would take a million copies of that book with me and stash them in every part of the landscape of my life that found me needing courage. Like I said before, she's an artist. The coolest kind of artist because she explains how to paint your own demons with instructions at the back of the book.
When I heard that Barry was releasing a book on writing, I was excited and curious. I was pretty sure that it wouldn't be like anything I'd seen before. It wasn't. It's a series of collages that combine found objects with her original work. It's an invitation to peek inside the darkest corners of her creative head space. It's eye candy that resonates and plucks at the memories that you have been collecting all of your life. It is What It Is.
The graphic organizer, "Stay Inside the Image," is basically like this. Imagine that you have a small circle at the middle of your paper. You are in that circle in a fixed position. Now, picture that circle as being on the center of an X. It would help if you draw this. The X will create four sections: in front of me, behind me, to my right and to my left. Finally, at the top of the paper is the "above me" section and at the bottom is "beneath me."
Students fill in this graphic organizer with details. They don't need to use complete sentences. Writers should choose a familiar place outside of the classroom and situate themselves in the image.
You can model the exercise by using your classroom to fill in a grid that you have drawn on your white board. What's above you? Well, the ceiling, right? Be more specific. Square, white drop ceiling tiles with pock marks. New water damage stains over the teacher's desk. Old stains that have been repaired and restained over the student computer. Fluorescent tube lighting. Black wires at the front of the room that hook to a mounted television. Black wires that the back of the room that power the document camera. In the center of the room is a small, beaded silver star ornament with a nickle-sized red heart at its center.
When it's time to incorporate a setting into a story, there's a balance between overburdening your prose with unnecessary details and losing your anchor completely which results in characters becoming "talking heads." Remember that this is a prewriting exercise to access a place. When this activity is shaped into a narrative, all of your details will not make the final cut. This is also a great activity to help students start a fictional story, but it's easier for me to get students started with this new technique if we first base it on a real place that they have experienced firsthand.
My favorite classroom art was completed by last year's geometry students. I was "babysitting" them while most of the 8th grade was taking the course three SOL. Our art teacher even let us borrow her classroom, so we felt like real, live artists.
First, I found a couple of photographs of Mr. Cash on line that I liked. My real, live artist boyfriend made us the patterns you see below. We then planned out which colors would go where.
The patterns for the collage. These were traced on poster board and cut out.
I toted in magazines for the students. At school, we cut out bits of black, light and dark browns, skin tone, silver and fingers! Yes, fingers! I was on a Romare Bearden kick since I saw his collage, "Three Folk Musicians," in a Scholastic Art magazine. You can see it by following this link. Be sure to zoom in on the fingers! http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Three-Folk-Musicians-1967-Posters_i1813743_.htm
Designated student pasters worked on different pieces of the collage. You can really see the beauty of the technique in the guitar below. We pieced it all together on a piece of red poster board.
The finished collage before strings, frets, tuning pegs and lamination.
When it was dry, I used a silver Sharpie to draw the guitar strings. I then cut strips from an old map of Arkansas and Tennessee to make the frets and tuning pegs. I made sure to include Dyess, Hendersonville and Nashville. Then, I hauled it to Office Max to be laminated.
Mr. Cash kept watch over the back left corner of my classroom behind my desk on the side of a file cabinet. He took on some water in my classroom when the tornado raised the roof. The seal of the lamination didn't protect him from mold. When I heard that the storm hit my school, I couldn't help but think of his song "Five Feet High and Rising."
Just yesterday, a parent of one of my current students sent me word of an end-of-year gift for my new classroom. She is also a sub, so she had seen my Johnny Cash art.
Here's what's on its way to me right now:
What's not to love?
Note: You certainly don't have to be an artist to facilitate such activities in your classroom. Leaf through some Scholastic Art magazines, see the lesson plans they've created and modify them to suit your curriculum, time constraints, needs and abilities. You won't believe the beauty that emerges.
