Last week one of my fellow Victorian bloggers Paula posted about teaching children how to write and the importance of using pictures. You can read her blog post here.
Everything she said made absolutely sense to me, but I had never broken it down to the degree she had. I had always put the emphasis on the writing, not the picture, when in fact, to some degree, it needs to be the other way around!
On Friday, I took her idea and put it into action.
Firstly I was amazed at the creative ability of the children in my class. I know I have been teaching them for 14 weeks now, but never had I said, draw in grey lead first – amazing! Usually I get blue people, scribble and no facial expressions. Here are a few I love…
Then we coloured it in.
(I loved the colourful snow!)
To explain – my teaching partner from last year broke his foot and he can’t do much at the moment – we decided to make him a book of him doing all his favourite things to cheer him up – waterskiing, snowboarding, playing basketball and teaching.
Some children had a go at writing words themselves, other’s copied directly from the board!
I was so happy how they turned out – I will definitely be using this strategy a lot more often!
Thank you Paula!
Gorgeous drawings!! I started doing the grey lead drawing first as part of Writer's Workshop style writing program last term, and boy did it have a huge impact on the quality of work my preps were producing. Amazing how such a small thing makes such a big impact!
Jemima
Luck's Little Learners
They look fantastic, Alison!
I'm a bit like you, in that the focus has (in the past) always been on the writing. But when I think back on it, when I first started teaching, we did do picture planners first, so I'm solo excited to give this a shot tomorrow for our journal writing. It makes so much sense! Thanks for sharing your pics – they look wonderful!
Stef
Miss Galvin Learns