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ELA Brave and True by Marilyn Yung

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Signs for your bulletin board or hallway

Headline poetry display signs for your bulletin board or hallway

headline-poetry-display-signs Download

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Instagram: elabraveandtrue

Last spring, I experimented with something new using The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane and here it is: I wanted to introduce my students to literary impressionism by noticing Crane's use of color and then creating a collaborative visual representation of the novel. My bio has a link to a post in my blog with tons of pictures, resources, some background, etc. Each student analyzed two consecutive chapters of the book and then created a representative collage. Here are photos of chapters 7-8 and 15-16, respectively, plus the entire book in last shot. Of course, there are improvements to be made, but this was an interesting first attempt.

I tried #firstchapterfriday all year long! (Okay, we missed a few due to random things.) Something else I tried: tying FCF to my weekly vocabulary mini-lessons on Thursdays. I would find a new word in my first chapter selection ahead of time, teach it on Thursday, and then have fun watching heads pop up around the room when students heard the word as I read aloud the next day. I think I’ll do FCF again next year. Several students told me it was something they looked forward to every week.

Let’s hope enough students sign up for Tsunami: A Poetry Experience, my new poetry class next fall! I want to make it a fun and motivational way to end the day... especially when I roll out the coffee cart to get the juices flowing. (My school has a four-day week, so we have a longer than usual school day and that last hour is l-o-n-g.) What better way to end the day than with some poetry?!

When a student decorates her envelope that will hold her sketchnotes from our end-of-year Gatsby unit. Over the next week or so, we’ll listen to the audio and decorate pages from each chapter of the book. And of course, the 2013 movie will top it off!

About ekphrastic poetry... “The arts challenge us with different points of view, compel us to empathize with ‘others,’ and give us the opportunity to reflect on the human condition,” write Brian Kisida and Daniel Bowen of The Brookings Institution in their article, “New Evidence of the Benefits of Arts Education.” To be sure, empathy and other soft skills, such as understanding and tolerance for ideas different from our own, are always in demand.

During the 2019-20 school term (remember that blissful time?!), I attempted one-pagers (from @nowsparkcreativity) twice, once in both the fall and spring. However, I was less than impressed with the results. I just didn’t receive quality, in-depth work from my students. The work was messy; the drawings were bare-bones. The necessary critical thinking and creativity just wasn’t evident in their one-pagers. In short, it was disappointing. But I didn’t give up. I gave it another go last month and tried one-pagers a third time. This time, I made one simple (like embarrassing simple) change. And y’know what?! It worked! Wonderful one-pagers... finally! Click the link in my bio to read more.

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Recent Posts

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Back to school: Four icebreaker poetry ideas August 23, 2021

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