Movement in Poetry "Dances From a Hat" 8th grade Language Arts

We have been studying Poetry and "Dances From a Hat" is great way to generate lots of vivid vocabulary.  Students ultimately used the list of words to build interesting poems.

I learned the technique from Barry Oreck's Arts Integration Workshop held here at ECA in September.  I was also fortunate to have several other teachers help during this process.Carolina F, Kat SR, and Michael A helped with supervision, planning, and the much needed debriefing at the end of the process.

Similar to what Barry did in our workshop, I first did some warm-up activities with students including 'Away and Back' and 'Move Freeze' .   (For more on activities check out this link:  Dance Activities)  I did these warm-ups over the course of several periods. The warm-ups are crucial to the success of the activity.

The phrases I used in my hat were: falling raindrop,gathering fog, burning fire, and melting ice cream.

DANCES FROM A HAT (Adapted from Mary Joyce)

Get into groups of 3 to 5 people. One person from each group draws a card with a word or phrase on it. The group looks at the card but does not show it to the other groups. Explain that the group will become one of these things. People may play different roles but they are all parts of the same thing – not different characters, people, or things in the surrounding environment. The structure for the dance is shape – movement – shape. The group starts in a still opening shape, moves like this thing and ends in a still closing shape. There are no sound effects or props in the first stage of explorations. Suggest that the group first discuss the qualities and characteristics – decide on the size, direction, energy, force, speed, where it starts and ends. Suggest that group members take turns stepping out to watch during the process. Give at least 10 minutes to prepare. When the dance is performed the audience is directed to describe what they see – not guess what the image is. After descriptions have been collected you may ask if any images come to mind.

See below for a video clip from one the dances. 

When we were done viewing each dance, we brainstormed lists of words which could describe what had been seen.  This requires a good bit of encouragement.  When all the dances and brainstorming were complete we wrote poems using the words.  The poems didn't necessarily have to be about the dances themselves, but many were inspired by their own dance.

Some of the students used these poems as part of their own poetry anthology.  Below is one of the poems (the poet added to and edited the poem several times before this final draft):

           Storm

by Ethel R

The sky turns into a sorrowful grey.

Pillows from the sky cry, and smooth drizzling begins.

Crackling drops of cold rainfall dive heavily like stone.

Sudden lightning electrifies the city.

bursts of thunder shout out to the wind

smooth drizzling starts to swiftly die.

Looks like heaven is heartbroken.

Below is a video of part of one of the dances-"Burning Fire" 

  

Books and Knives

As the culminating project of the year's first unit -- a unit designed to philosophically explore the question "What is History?" -- Books and Knives cut right to the heart of the matter. To start the unit, we studied quotes about history, then wrote poetry about history, then applied the Allegory of the Cave to history, and then finally we were ready to cut up some textbooks.

The idea that history does not equal textbook and vice versa drives the unit. Through this project the students were given a chance to practice redefining history. The requirements were to tear the pages out of a history book and use metaphor and collage to communicate a personal definition of history. Allowing the students to define history on their own invites them to engage with the year's curriculum more deeply -- it has now become something personal.

The end product of the unit is a personal definition of history. I just had to choose a format for communicating that definition. Since art is often a very personal endeavor, it made sense to integrate art into this unit. Collage was a simple enough medium for the students, and it allowed for wide-open creativity.

The students wrote metaphor explications which will accompany their books at the Middle School art show. However only the books are shown in the slideshow below. Enjoy!

Advanced Art Lab Mural

While not entirely an arts integration project, this mural involved a lot of cross-disciplinary learning. The 8th grade focused a lot on metaphor, figurative language, and symbolism in many of their classes this year. Twelve students in the Advanced Art Lab full-year elective course took these ideas all the way to the completion of a large-scale mural based on the journey through middle school. They used metaphor and symbolism in the images and the narrative of the mural itself, as well as in their narration. Here is a video we put together, which explains the mural's meaning, and shows a cool, time-lapse sequence of the work they did throughout the year. The video was used in a dedication assembly we had this week. Enjoy!

Illustrating Poetry: Being Figurative

Language Arts 8

8th grade students were required to write a series of poems as part of their poetry unity. Their teacher, Pat Ludwig, wanted them to produce an illustrated book of their poems. We saw this as an opportunity to extend their thinking about what purpose an illustration serves. They had been working with metaphor, irony, and figurative language in class, and we wanted them to transfer those skills from the realm of language to that of imagery. This is what meaningful arts integration is all about: not merely showering kids with art projects, but using the arts as a vehicle to help them think and communicate in different ways; to understand that each of the arts can come at the same concepts from different angles.

In the slideshows below, you can see the steps we led the students through to reach an understanding of how they could be figurative in their approach to illustrating their poems, followed by examples from their final poetry books. The books were produced using Blurb, and the students were given the option of finding images in royalty-free image databases, or creating their own original artworks. Please note that you may pause the slideshows, or click on them to view a full-sized version.

Creating Infographics: What is History?

Social Studies 8

Michael Stein-Ross, our Social Studies 8 Teacher, came to me with the idea of having his students create infographics. He was having them devise their own definition of history, and wanted them to be able to give visual form to these ideas. Infographics have become a natural outgrowth of both the information revolution and the increasingly visual nature of our ever-expanding media universe. They vary in quality and eloquence, but the act of creating one provided a nice vehicle for exploring how to communicate an idea or message visually.

 Below is a slideshow that walks you through our lesson sequence, and here are a couple of great resources we found along the way:

"Teaching with Infographics: Places to Start" from the New York Times Learning Network

"A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods" from visual-literacy.org.