Visual+Arts

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Visual art is important for all students but especially for ELL students. These activities will allow the students to express themselves in their own creative ways. As a teacher, providing your students with lessons that encourage exploring and creating art that displays beauty will set the classroom in a welcoming and happy environment. A welcoming and warming environment will help students be engaged in learning and further exploration of themselves.=====

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In this activity the teacher will model their own “Life Map” and explain what they have put on their “Life Map” and why. There are no words on a “Life Map” so the students will have to find pictures of things that represent significant moments in their life. This could be an in class activity and may take a day to complete and then the next day to present what the students have made for the “Life Map”. This is a great activity for ELL because it gives them the chance to use pictures and symbols to illustrate what they are thinking. Also, they can look at the other students “Life Maps” and think about why the students might have used that picture to represent a moment in their life. For example if a student puts a picture of a hospital at the beginning of their “Life Map”, the ELL could think for their self that the reason was because the student was born at the hospital. Gives the students the chance to think for themselves and draw their own conclusion of the “Life Maps”. =====

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I like this activity I found because it also gives the visual art project an autobiography introduction as well. If the students are learning about famous people throughout history and reading short autobiographies about them, letting them do a hands on activity to create their own will help them grasp the concept of what an autobiography’s purpose is. This activity would be appropriate for students in 3rd and above grade levels. =====

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Bigham, Lindsay. "Education World ® Lesson Plan: Drawing a Life Map." //Education World® The Educator's Best Friend//. 01 Nov. 2006. Web. 21 Feb. 2011. .=====

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This activity comes from a presentation at the ITBE conference by Amy Heineke from Loyola University Chicago about incorporating multicultural literature into the classroom. Children’s literature, especially multicultural literature is a good way to incorporate art/visuals into the classroom. Using multicultural literature can take some of the pressure off the students because they already understand the background and can focus on just the reading comprehension. One way to creatively engage students is to get them working with photography. George Ancona has a series of books called “Somos Latinos” that are illustrated with his photography. Amy talked about an activity, related to this series of books, that a teacher she talked to applied for and received a grant to complete in the classroom with her students. Each of the books in the series has a specific topic (e.g. My School, My Neighborhood, My Family). Inside the books are photographs relating to the topic and a few sentences in Spanish and English that describe the picture. This teacher got a grant that allowed her to get disposable cameras for the students to take pictures and for her to be able to get them developed so that the students could make their own books. I think this is a great idea because it allows the students to tell about something that they know! The students could work on writing the short sentences in their native language and then work on translating them to English with the help of a peer or the teacher. I also think that this might be a great partner activity if it was done in a dual language classroom that had an even number of L1 & L2 students. In this way the students could take their own pictures and write their own sentences then work with another student who is fluent in the opposite language to do the translations. Another way to do this activity would be for the whole class to write one book that could then be left in the classroom for future classes. In this case the topic may be something school related and perhaps a digital camera from the school might be used under the teacher’s supervision to take the pictures, the topic might be “Our Class” and detail special things about the classroom or the students inside the class.=====

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