During a recent workshop with Michael McDowell, he asked us to view 4 images and write one statement. The purpose was to encourage ‘deep’ thinking. This prompted some great discussion between myself and my colleagues as we attempted to come up with just one sentence. We were all excited when we finally managed to create out statement. We certainly had to think, we were all engaged and there was plenty of collaboration.
I decided to try it with my Year 2 students this week. I placed them in groups of 3 and gave one instruction:
Write me one sentence that tells me about the four pictures.
I gave them a whiteboard to record their response, which really promoted thinking and rethinking.
Four Images
One Sentence
I was so excited that they were able to collaborate and present us with some great responses. A terrific first attempt…
They are all built by people.
The pictures are all in public and they are all paintings and man-made.
They are all painted and have animals and are inspired.
They represent the story behind the place.
All 4 pics represent Australia in their own way.
They all have a story to it and they all have life and nature.
Michael suggested that you can give a sentence stem to get the students started. I wonder what the sentences may have been if I offered a sentence stem such as:
Art can….
Next…I asked them to ‘rank’ the images…and gave no criteria!
When given this task only a few asked ‘how’, they were meant to order the images. most just jumped in and ranked them. The most popular criteria used by students was to rank the images in order of how much they ‘liked’ them. Some were more creative. My favourite order and reasoning was…
- The fence artwork as it had one surface
2. The koala because there are two koalas
3. The silos because there are three
4. The steps…because there are more than three!
Connect and Wonder
I used these activities as a prompt for my Library unit on street art, and how street art can often show us the story of a community. My lessons will support the class history unit The Past in the Present.
The core text for my library learning will be this beautiful book – Hey Wall written by Susan Verde and illustrated by John Parra.
From a library perspective my learning intentions will be:
Students will be able to:
- interpret and use texts to explore topics, gather information and make some obvious inferences (IFF1L.1.2)
- pose questions to identify and clarify issues, and compare information (IFF1I.1.1)
- use imagination or creative thinking to connect two things that seem different (IFF1I.1.2)
The featured image is one of many historical murals in Kurri Kurri NSW.