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Laurence Musgrove
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Recent Posts
Fun Yoga Party
Last night at yoga, our instructor gave us a pose she said would be fun, one we could show off at parties. Dhanurasana - Bow Pose. I now have an entirely new attitude about what I’m doing.
Posted in Comics
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Team Mapping as Literary Analysis
In my sophomore literature class today, I had my students begin preparing for their final literary analysis essay by practicing collaborative learning and four response strategies to a short story by Tim O’Brien “The Things They Carried.” They had read the story and prepared a written response that they brought to class and shared in 7 small teams of about 3 students each. In this response, they wrote about the formal elements of the story, including point-of-view, plot structure, characterization, and figurative language. I then asked them to map out a visual representation of four of the five response strategies I’ll ask them to demonstrate on their final paper for the class: personal, topical, formal, and contextual.
Initially, they created fairly simple response maps or networks of these response strategies.
Then I asked them to return to the story and provide textual evidence that would further support the claims they were making about the response strategies.
Next, I had them select one team member to serve as tour guide and the rest of the students moved from map to map for the presentation of each team’s visual.
Beyond the practice students gained in literary analysis, visual thinking, creative problem-solving, and teamwork, 7 of the students also had the opportunity (6 times!) to employ their oral presentation skills as tour guides. I will use this teaching and learning strategy in future classes because of the multiple opportunities if affords students to work, communicate, and learn together.
Posted in Teaching Reading, Visual Thinking, Work in Higher Edu
Tagged The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
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Visualizing Sentences
Today in my English Grammar class, an advanced course for English majors wishing to teach secondary English and those with a Technical and Business Writing concentration, I put students in seven small groups and asked them to invent a visual system for diagramming sentences. We have been reading Kitty Burns Florey’s Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, specifically a chapter on the history of the Clark and Reed-Kellogg sentence diagramming systems, and I thought it would be a fun challenge to have students create their own visual vocabulary.
They jumped right in, and here below is the assignment and seven sets of results. They used large Post-It paper on the classroom walls. The first page is the legend; the second includes the three sentences using the diagramming system they invented. Not bad for a 45 minute exercise. Click on images for larger view.
Invent a simple visual system for diagramming sentences that does not use the Clark or Reed-Kellogg diagramming rules. You will need to invent a simple visual system for diagramming the following three sentences.
- I lost my new iPhone yesterday.
- Hey! That blue Prius is just beautiful.
- After I graduate, I will sleep all day and eat what I like.
On one sheet, create a legend that explains the basics of your visual system. For example, how are the different parts of a sentence and their functions to be represented, ordered, and linked? You may use shapes, images, symbols, and color. On another sheet, demonstrate how this system would visually represent the three sentences above.
Independent Reading and Handmade Thinking
In a recent post, I talked about my visit to St. John’s School in Houston and my work with students and teachers there on Handmade Thinking.
Sharon Fabriz, an 8th grade English teacher, asked her students to create handmade responses to their independent reading projects, and here below are some of those awesome, awesome 8.5 X 11 page drawings.
In response to Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson:
In response to I Am the Messenger by Markus Zusak:
In response to Sphinx’s Queen by Esther Friesner.
In response to The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein:
In response to Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins:
In response to The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie:
Did I say “8th graders”? Did I say “awesome”?
