Teacher gives out this assignment in pieces. The students don’t get the next piece of the puzzle until they have finished the prior one. This both helps them to be less overwhelmed as well as to keep them from tailoring their writing and choices to fit the final products, thereby making them stretch more.
1. Choose three pictures:
- Old family photo
- Magazine clipping
- Recent shot
2. Jot down some observations for each item. Start with the aesthetics and what you notice. Then, move on to how they make you feel or personal associations.
3. Next, write a short and dirty sketch of what is going on in each photo, using some of the ideas you prepared above.
4. Finally, starting fresh, see how you can create a narrative that relates these three items in a natural and easy way. You can choose to write it in poem or prose form. Students should focus more on making a natural, easy, creative connection between the items more than worry about the form the narrative takes.
This is a cool assignment. I've found it a bit difficult for the students (but fun for me) in the past when I keep them in the dark about what the next step will be. They don't always want to plan ahead, but they sure do want to know what's going on. This assignment can work in so many ways, be tailored to so many different units and classroom situations, but I like the overall idea of finding a thematic tie, or maybe even something very small which ties everything together.
ReplyDeletei really like it.....
ReplyDeletethe anticipation would build, and that would get the students more engaged. also, connecting their writing to personal things/memories would get their creative juices flowing......
the great thing is you could do variations of this assignment in many ways.......you could even tie it to things they are working on in your class (or other classes).