I've spent the last four weeks attending two college courses that I thoroughly enjoyed far beyond my initial expectations. I learned how to work with another colleague to develop an interdisciplinary unit. A task that I knew was possible as I already do a bit of it in my 6th grade art classes with their social studies units. I learned many content area literacy strategies to incorporate into the Art room, yes I said it the Art room! I have been a little weary of incorporating reading and writing in my room beyond the, "there's art magazines over there you can read when you're finished with your work" and "here's a self-critique tell me what you liked about your work and what you didn't like".
But I had a professor change all of that for me. I found that you can sneak it in, here and there and the kids will probably not even notice that you are doing it! You can also differentiate your readings too! How might you ask? It's simple take an article you find online, copy and paste into a Word document. Save it twice, one you can leave as is and then change the second copy by eliminate the harder words to make it easier for those who have a difficult time reading. You can label the normal one PG-13 and the other easier one PG, and let the kids gravitate to the ones they feel more comfortable with. How novel right?! No kid wants to be put into groups where they clearly know who has a higher reading level than the other. Kids aren't dumb, they know when they are being singled out. I have a notebook filled with ideas of how to meet reading and writing across the curricula. I know it will take some time out of making Art, but I was truly inspired by my professor Dr. Bickford at Eastern Illinois University. He made me a believer that you can easily add in higher order thinking tasks beyond the just create/make in Art class. Sentence scramble is another group task that is a deciphering activity. Print out the directions to say how to build a clay vessel. Cut up each task and scramble them up and place in an envelope. As a group they have to work together to figure out the proper order to build a successful vessel. What a great way to have the kids work together to get to an end conclusion and learn visually and through reading directions on how to do the piece. You can sentence scramble anything, even a primary source letters or journal entries. Making connections is another task where students writing questions or comments about artwork, artist, careers, etc. on post-it notes and apply them to the posters. Then each group is given a poster and they have to research to find the questions that are asked and present their findings to the class. They have to use primary sources, cite them, and work together to get to the final answer. Many many more are out there, I can't wait to do more research on it.
I'm learning they are indeed needing to be 21st century learners, prepared even at the junior high level for future college education and careers. I can't wait to try out the things I have learned over the last few weeks and to share all of this with my colleagues in the other vocational subjects as well. They have to know that it doesn't matter what class they sit in, they should be creating art like artists, looking at artwork like art historians, learning about science like a scientist, reading about history like a historian, cooking in home ec like a chef, and realize that you do have to write and read in all these subjects. You can just make art, you can't just cook and consume food, you have to do the rest of the "work" like us adults do in our real life jobs, what a difference this perspective will have in the classroom.
