Literacy Jenga

Inspired by the great Mrs Arty Textiles I decided to finally test out literacy jenga this week with my A2 classes to push the use of educational gaming and make literacy more appealing and less daunting. I'm also a huge lover of independent learning and believe strongly that they my students should be coming up with their own innovative ideas as practicing artists so took the opportunity to test the much loved family game with target setting.

Within my current SOW we are currently reaching the end of initial responses and I find that students can sometimes miss the important elements from their artists. So, before it was too late we started with a brief peer response and focused on descriptive language. I have recently found the fantastic App Wordswag and use it for making engaging visuals within lessons. The students love it and since the use of the App I have found that they have become more focused on specific tasks and are able to respond to questioning more confidently. I also use the App for projecting homework at the end of a lesson and hope that my students become more excited about the thought of extension tasks.

After this initial activity I split the class into groups of 4-5 and each group received a 'literacy jenga' pack with visual, technical and descriptive keywords on it. My classes like competing against one another and taking part in 'Art Olympics' so it was great to see 17-18 year olds so enthralled in stacking the game together. Once the jenga was constructed each student took it in turns to pick out a keyword and write it on the template above. As a group, we continued until each person had either 4 keywords each or the tower block tumbled!

It was fantastic to watch each group racing to write language down and taking risks at how the 3D form could balance on one block. The students then used the words to independently set themselves targets (one for that lesson) and embedded the keyword within a to-do list. Within that lesson I saw a huge improvement in the quality of written work and it was great to see all learners still actively using the sheet in follow-up lessons and within their analysis of preparatory work.

At the end of the lesson students returned to their original partner from the descriptive language activity and assessed if they had achieved their target from 1-10. Much to my surprise all students in the class were above halfway and all had confident explanations as to how they had met their target and improved developmental work in just 35 minutes. The pace and quality of work that was produced in this lesson was brilliant and my learners are participating more actively in independent work within 24 hours!

The literacy buzz is catching and it's already going around the rest of the department that my classes have been playing jenga in lessons. I love that my students are willingly producing more written work from this activity and I can't wait to test the game out again but with a different take. We'd love to collaborate/share resources with other teachers so if you are interested in making words more engaging within art and design then leave a comment below #literacyjenga.

- Kirsty ❤ 

Digital: Pinterest, why I think all Art Teachers should be using it!

I've done a few posts on here over the last two years about Pinterest but having recently given a talk at a staff training event I realised things have changed in two years! Pinterest has some new functions and I have some more articulate ways of explaining why I think Pinterest's is so great and why I think all Art Teachers should be jumping on the Pinterest Bandwagon! 

Social Networking tool/Digital

It's digital! (obviously, I hear you cry!) but that has a fair few benefits for us as Art teachers:

• It can be submitted in that format to your exam boards! Edexcel even have an article on it and we have experience of submitting it as part of student research for three years now. It has always been simple and painless and relatively well received (more so now that it is more widespread!)
• You can save money on printing and time on presenting (for you or students, however it works at your place) instead of printing out, cutting, sticking and hand writing around it, students can just send you the link to their account! We use the 3W approach that we use here on the blog with our students for annotating their boards
• It's a great and easy way to effectively introduce a digital tool and a social networking tool into the classroom without it being a token gesture! I've always found making 'quizzes' and other smart board related tools largely geared towards exam based subjects. There's plenty of ways to get it used in class and outside, starter activities, collaborative boards between students or between staff and students, homework tasks, a main tool for a full research based, etc! 
• In my experience students don't see it as a chore, they actively engage with it! They don't just use it in a professional manner for their project work, they are using it for personal interest too, a fact which I think should be celebrated! 

Digital Literacy

I love this term. Digital Literacy has been on the curriculum for a few years but in places I've worked it's never really been on the agenda, so to speak. This case study by Future labs highlights the key components of digital literacy, amongst them are collaboration, E-safety, the ability to find and select information, effective communication and creativity. Pinterest is a tool which you can use to develop all of these skills with students.
E-safety by creating your own boards to share with students you can navigate them to appropriate content and as part of the introduction to Pinterest with students it's worth cover things like spam accounts and how to spot them!
The ability to find and select information again you can kick start this process but then it's up to students. Pinterest will give them help with this suggesting relevant boards each time they pin but a key part of getting pinterest to work with your students is explaining the pin it button and getting them to pin straight from the source!
Effective communication students will need to come up with appropriate titles and a description to explain what their board is about and as I mentioned previously we use the 3W approach to aid them in annotating. They need to ensure that when another person views their boards that they understand the themes and messages they are trying to communicate! Another good activity is to help the develop stages of research through different boards. There can be an initial board with everything on and this can be narrowed down and selected from for later more considered boards, and so on!
Creativity, Pinterest is great to kick start a project! students boards can be filled with ideas from inspirational art and design work to mate

Secret Boards

I think this was my favourite addition and is an absolute asset when it comes to planning. For anyone else out there who likes to put together boards for things like exam topics, you may too previously remember spending the morning before you delivered the themes pinning away or delaying creating your boards till after you had delivered it but no more! When it launched there was a cap of just 6 boards but since mid February secret boards have gone unlimited! Woo-hoo! Now you can plan away and launch the boards exactly when you want them meaning you can plan terms ahead and pin ideas for future projects. 

Our Pinterest Accounts 

The thing we have found about Pinterest is that it's quite addictive once you get started! What we have also found is that what is relevant for I heart Teaching Art is not necessarily relevant for work and sometimes there's stuff we'd just like to pin for ourselves. The solution...multiple accounts. When we first used Pinterest at work we all worked at the same college and worked across several subjects. We also had a large cohort of BTEC students so we had one account with boards for different subjects and felt it was good for students from different disciplines to have access to a wide range of artists and designers. When me and Kirsty started at our new place we had much larger groups of students and were only teaching one subject (amazing!) and felt it would be best to provide them with a more specialist and detailed range of resources so we created individual pinterest accounts for our courses. We also like to pin our own bits and pieces so we have our own personal accounts (I'm a fan of pinning cooking, house inspiration, tattoos and things I'd like to knit). Check out the links below to see our different accounts:

• I heart Teaching Art
• Coulsdon Sixth Form College
• The Sixth Form College Farnborough: Fine Art
• The Sixth Form College Farnborough: Textiles
• Claire (personal)
• Kirsty (personal)
• Jessica (personal) 

Previous Posts

In case you're curious and want to look back at my previous posts about Pinterest you can check them here (remember one of them is 2 years old so it may be a little out of date!)

• Project Idea
• Digital Tools we love, Part I
• Pinterest Teachers Hub

If you're not on Pinterest already what are you waiting for? Come and follow us on there!

- Claire ❤

Visual Literacy

I don't know about you but I always find myself continuously racking my brains for innovative ideas of how to successfully embed literacy and maths within the arts. Visual literacy is an area that has always interested me and believe it is a great, creative way to develop student's learning. Recently, for an observed lesson I chucked myself in the deep end and created a starter activity inspired by this fantastic resource from The Photographers' Gallery entitled: What do you see? The concept of the activity is that it is designed to develop learners visual literacy skills by asking them to describe and draw the subject and compositional elements of a photograph. This idea was perfect as I was fortunate enough that my students at the time were responding to primary photographs!

I'm even luckier that most of my classes have a perfect match to work in pairs but if not don't worry - three's can work too. Just double the drawer or the describer up. You can make the activity as long or short as you like - I gave mine two minutes each to describe/draw as I enjoy short and sharp activities!

 

Step 1. Find a partner 

Step 2. Swop your primary photographs with your partner and choose one image you would like your partner to draw - keep it hidden from your partner!

Step 3. Start describing the photograph to your partner without showing the image. The partner must try to draw the image based on your description. You may ask questions of each other, act out poses and look at the drawing together as long as the photograph is kept hidden.

Step 4. Now, swop and repeat the process.

Step 5. Lay out the drawings next to the photograph and compare them.

The students really engaged with the activity and it was great to see the drawer acting out poses to understand verbal descriptions/instructions! The responses after the activity were all positive and some were surprised at how quickly they could produce a detailed drawing through the use of language. At the end of the activity I got students to respond to three set questions:

1. How do the drawings compare with the original photographs?

2. Did your partner describe any details in the photograph you may not of originally noticed?

3. What descriptive words did you find most useful when listening to instructions?

Feedback from learners was positive and all were able to confidently answer the 3 questions above. Even better, students were able to comment that it enabled them to see parts of the image which they may of not noticed beforehand. For example: texture, line, elements within the back/foreground. After the activity I got my students to continue responding to their primary photographs - making sure they applied the skills they had learnt from the activity to notice every, tiny detail. Some were even repeating the descriptive words to remember how to draw marks! 

Overall, I found this activity ensured accurate observation and students understood what they were seeing/drawing which resulted in higher-level critical thinking! We think this activity is great for any art discipline and would work well with paintings/drawings etc as well as photographs. The feedback could even be changed into a critique!

As always let us know if you have tried this activity or have other fun ways of using visual literacy in your lessons. We'd love to hear them!

- Kirsty ❤