Jan 25: Introductory Literacy Blog

After browsing through the text on the Critical Literacies Blog, I came to understand more about the importance of critical literacy and how it helps to engage thought among both children and adults. After reading the post titled, "Street Art", I began to think about some of the artwork put together by some of my students. While the blog entry centered on artwork in Granada, it made me think about how important it is for educators to infuse art in the classroom.

As an English teacher, I feel I can incorporate student strenghts through different forms of literacy into my Literacy Development classes. I believe that I can easily achieve this goal by incorporating such art activities into our daily review of reading strategies. Because the curriculum I teach does not allow for extreme amounts of flexibility, I regularly make handouts to ensure my students grasp certain concepts centering on reading strategies. One of the reading strategies I have to model for my students involves creating images while reading. In order to ensure the students are creating images, I have a handout that asks them to draw their interpretation of a section in the text being read for that day.

After reading Jackie's post, I began to think of how I can incorporate my student's artwork into the classroom as a way to show a different angle of literacy. In order to effectively show that my students, while sometimes cannot dictate their ideas through speech and/or writing, can prove their literacy skills through artwork. As a result of reading her short blog entry and looking at the picture, I have begun to think of an activity that I can use to proudly display an uncommonly used artifact that demonstrates a student's knowledge of what he/she just finished reading.

I am thinking of assigning a project that will allow students to each draw a scene from a story we read collaboratively or select an article we read together and draw their interpretations of it -- once this is complete, I can post all of the drawings on the wall in the order of the story (through assigning different scenes to different students). This collage of student work will be used to showcase some of the student strengths that are not commonly seen.

I will post pictures once I have come up with lessons to complete this idea...