Writing+-+visual+literacy

Visual literacy
I have been having a lot of fun over term 2 playing with visual images as writing prompts and oral language development.

Last week I ran a lesson which began with a photo of a young girl sliding down a steep slide with a terrified look on her face, hair flying wildly in the air. I used this picture with the hope that my preps would come up with some 'interesting sentences' using lots of adjectives. We first labelled the things we could see in the picture (girl, slide, sack, hair, eyes), we then came up some verbs (sliding, throwing up - once she got off the slide - haha!), and finally some describing words (//crazy// eyes, //terrified// face, //steep// slide). In between each brainstorm I asked the kids to 'tight turn and talk' to their friend and tell them the words they were thinking of, and then listed them on the board. This took WAY longer than it ever had before which at the time I thought was a bad thing but in retsopect I think it was positive as we had SO many words to write up on our picture on the IWB and the kids were engaged for the entire time as they were actively communicating with their peers and they each got to add to our word wall! (When I first did this lesson it took us 5 minutes max. to come up with our nouns, verbs and adjectives).

Paula and I then each modelled an interesting sentence using some of the kids' words and set them off to write their own sentences.

As I walked around the room and came across students who had used describing words to make their sentence 'interesting' I stopped everyone and read out their sentence to everyone, praised them and then walked around again. The kids were a little taken aback as I read their work out loud for the first time but they were all very proud and chuffed with themselves and the other students then kept giving me their work to be read out! Hopefully they will work hard like this every week to have their work read out! :)

At the end of the lesson I had everyone sit in a circle and share their writing with the person sitting next to them (tight turn and talk).

I was pretty happy with this lesson! Everyone was made a super writer this lesson as they all tried their very best and everyone reached their goal of using describing words to make their sentences interesting.