Reading in the Middle, Junior and Senior High Schools, Spring, 2010

I found a great writing lesson plan for sixth to eighth grade students on www.readwritethink.org (http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/picture-worth-thousand-words-116.html?tab=4#tabs). The lesson is based off the the saying "a picture's worth a thousand words". As a writing activity, the students can bring in pictures from home or of their favorite artists, or the teacher can pass out pictures from a history lesson or of people in different cultures with which a narrative story can be written. After looking at the picture and studying it for a few minutes, the students will individually write down notes and thoughts in their writer's notebooks about any details or features that stand out to him/her. Once they have all their notes written, they can begin to brainstorm about the characteristics and events in the pictures and start to form a narrative story. They will be writing from one character's point of view and can tell of his/her feelings and actions of the events leading up to what is happening in the picture or the event immediately following the picture. The students will be encouraged to come up with an original story based on the picture they are given. An online Timeline Tool will be be available for those students who want to use it. The students need to be taught and reminded to "focus a clear, well-defined incident or series of related events, create a developed plot, character, and setting, order events correctly, use description and dialogue, establish tone and point of view, and use good transitional phrases".

This is a great way to encourage creative writing and let the students write about whatever they want to. Instead of writing always being seen as no fun and purely factual, this gives students a chance to express themselves and practice creative writing skills. It is also a good complimentary activity to do when studying art in the Renaissance Era or a history lesson. If this is a lesson being used in an inclusive classroom, students with special needs can easily do this with accommodations.

This is a great lesson! I think I tend to gravitate toward lesson plan help with language arts. I have always liked math, and so ideas for lessons in math tend to come to me more easily than those involving reading and writing. Having said that, I want my students' experiences to be different, I want them to enjoy all subjects and approach them with lots of enthusiasm. I think it is my job to make each subject interesting and easy to approach with my students. This activity makes writing an original narrative personal and more interesting by incorporating a picture of something important to the student or from the student's life. I also like that this lesson could be adapted to whatever subject I am teaching. Because I am a special education major, I may be asked to teach any subject, so being able to make this lesson cross-curricular would be a great way for my students to get the same information twice and learn it even better. Repetition is key for most students with exceptionalities, and even for typically developing students, getting important information twice cannot hurt. I enjoyed this lesson and will certainly refer back to it when I am teaching, especially since I have noted that I want the middle school age group for my Block I experience. Thanks Katherine!! :)

This sounds like a fun way to get students to write. It is a creative way go give them a prompt to write about and encourages them to use a lot of creativity. It could also be adapted to just be a conversation starter or to get the students to collaborate and create a story as a group. Good job Katherine.

I think I did this lesson when I was in middle school! I remember doing something very similar. I had an English teacher that used to teach Art, so pretty much all of her lessons were creative and involved pictures, drawing, and "out of the box" thinking. She was actually one of my favorite teachers because she always challenged us to relate our writing to other aspects of our lives, especially pictures. She always had us draw out time lines and draw out our emotional responses to various works of writing-- I think she used a lesson very similar to the one you described, especially because we always had to formulate stories based off of single images. This type of lesson is very useful in engaging students because it offers something that they are not used to-- the students who are not as talented at thinking critically can really shine because they can think abstractly about a photo or a visual and then work on their writing from there. Good find with this lesson!

Response to my experience in using the Anticipation Guide:

I enjoyed filling out the anticipation guide before reading the article to kind of test my knowledge and start thinking about how the internet effects the brain and how men and women use the internet differently. The article was very interesting. It was interesting to read how men and women use the internet differently. Women tend to use the internet for more social purposes, such as e-mail and social networking sites. Men use the internet for more things that are visual such as video games and online transactions. I also thought it was very interesting when the article talked about how the internet is not "dumbing us down" but is working many parts of the brain and making us smarter and is sharpening our visual-spatial and verbal skills. It was interesting to go back and re-answer the questions on the anticipation guide after reading the article. This is a good activity and very informative of the internet relating to the differences of men and women.