Dr. Schmidt showed us an example of a wordless book today and some activities that she's done with it. I found this to be an awesome idea! Wordless books usually tend to have really good illustrations and I've wanted to find a way to incorporate them into a lesson. Using them as a writing prompt was a great way to get students writing a story in a quick and dirty way. Using a prompt like this minimized the brainstorming portion as well as the illustrating which are two steps in writing stories that take students a long time. This really allows you to have them focus on their writing and make it as good as they can, as well as being creative and hopefully different from other student's stories. I thought this could also be taught with learning about perspectives. Each time someone reads a story, they bring their background knowledge into it and can get a completely different meaning from the same story.
I also really like the art she used as writing prompts. I am somewhat familiar with the artist she showed since my mom really liked him. The pictures he does are very interesting and have peculiar things going on in them, such as the "THING" under the rug. Students like when something is a little wacky and out of the ordinary so I'm sure they would love to create a story based off of one of his pictures. I look forward to doing this someday!
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I also thought this was a great idea. I have never really worked with a wordless book, but remember being introduced to a few in my reading methods class. Even though I love the illustrations, I also wasn't sure how they would be used in the classroom. The idea of using them for a writing prompt is great! The book that her previous student made using one of the books was really neat. I also like your twist of working on character perspectives.
ReplyDeleteSince we are both focusing on younger grades, I wanted the throw out the idea of using these books to allow student to orally tell stories. In preschool and kindergarten, having students tell stories would be a great way to assess their understanding of story structure and elements. These could even be recorded by the teacher to create books for the classroom!