Overview of Lessons in Writer’s Workshop Curriculum
The Writer’s Workshop Curriculum
In this curriculum, elementary students make text-to-self-connections with the artwork to generate ideas or “seeds” for narrative writing. Students then turned a seed into a first person narrative by adding details. They also evaluated their short essay’s descriptive language, strong leads and strong endings. They revised their writings with support from the Colorado College students, then rehearsed reading them out-loud. After six lessons, all 28-30 students in each class had a powerful piece of writing that they were ready to share with others.
Curriculum connects students to art
Elementary students were introduced to the art cards in the first lesson when teachers framed the project with the following statement:
The Fine Arts Center museum wants to know what their art work makes you think about in your own life. The museum wants to know the connections between their art and your lives! To do this, each of you will be writing personal narratives about a connection you have to a work of art on the art cards. We will start by generating seeds for our journals today and tomorrow, then choose a connection to develop into a narrative that you will read aloud in front of that artwork when we go on a field trip to museum. Those of you who get a permission slip signed will be video- taped as you read so that other visitors to the museum can watch you reading your personal narrative!”
Students were then shown the series of questions and asked to look through the art cards until they found a work of art that helped them think of an answer.
The prompts for students to think about while browsing through the art cards included:
Which artwork reminds you of –
- a story about yourself?
- of your family?
- a place you have been?
- of someone you know?
- a time when you felt a strong emotion: sad, happy, embarrassed…?
- something you’ve learned?
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Each lesson spanned a forty minute writing block, with the classroom teacher delivering the lesson. CC students supported the writing time by working with individual students as they wrote, asking students to apply the mini-lesson given on that day. All three teachers involved in the MN pilot expressed surprise that the art cards generated so much discussion among the students when they had a chance to pair-share seed ideas. They were also surprised that this led to their students being more focused on their writing.
When students came to the museum for a field trip, we hoped that the lessons involving art cards developed a comfort level for students to talk about art. The students came to the museum with their personal narratives in hand, ready to view the real works of art and share what they had written. This author-sharing of their narratives was captured on video while students were on the field trip. Then, through the use of the augmented reality technology, Aurasma, children’s responses to the art could be shared with other school groups and visitors to the museum.
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