Incorporating Visual Aids in the Classroom

One area I want to improve in my classroom is visual learning. I feel I have many creative assignments but I don't ask my students (or myself) to spend a lot of time carefully making something artistic.

This week, I purposefully chose a few activities that required my students and me to spend time drafting and creating visual representations of our learning. Here are my results for this week:


Claim-Support "Anchor" Chart

My 9th graders were writing Research Reports this week, so I wanted a quick and easy visual guide for how they can properly cite their sources. I think I spent too much time on the design and not the information, but that's okay. It added some color to my classroom and became a conversation piece, if nothing else.


Choose Your Own Adventure

My Honors 10th graders were assigned a group project in which they drew a random Modern Literary Movement and had to research it to produce three things: a Google Drawing representing their Era, an Annotated Bibliography, and an individual Poetic Analysis of a poem from that Movement. Last year I just had them draw the Movements out of a bucket, but this year I decided to make things a little more interesting by asking them to choose their own adventure. They loved this mystery and literally dashed to the whiteboard to draw their topic. It was funny because, even though they didn't know what was written on each scroll, they still argued over which one was best!


Black-Out Poetry 

One of the student organizations I advise is the Creative Arts Magazine for our high school. It's a low-stress club that collects student-created art, writing, and photography to be published in an annual magazine. We celebrate the arts and the magazine by hosting a school-wide Creative Arts Gala. Our Gourmet Foods class even caters the event! I decided to ask the students in the club to make some Black-Out Poetry. I'd never done it before, so I didn't know what to expect, but we all settled in and took the task seriously. We spent about an hour each just making one poem! Honestly, they turned out amazingly. Also, I have been sick this entire week, so I thought it fitting to create my poem around the concept of "Germs" :)

Comments

  1. AnonymousJanuary 21, 2018 at 8:15 AM

    I really like how you're using your creative side to help liven up your classroom, and some of the more mundane topics (like citations). I'm sure the kids appreciate it!

    How could you engage your students more when creating these visuals?

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousApril 14, 2018 at 3:27 PM

    How would you incorporate black-out poetry into a lesson within your curriculum? Our Library has been giving away a lot of free books lately, so after I talked with you, I went and got a armful of books to try it out myself.

    The See Evidence and Cite it visual you made is very cute and useful. I want to make a series of visuals for citing textual evidence to use in my room next year, possibly using a variety of sources.

    ReplyDelete

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