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Thursday 8 November 2012

Students Writing About Their Own Artwork

Today i did a bit of an experiment to see how my students interacted with sentence starters when writing about their own artwork. I have templates made for all of my projects, some generic and some a bit more specific to the given project. Regardless all of the templates give the students guidance in how they should be thinking about their projects. For example, a question from one of my handouts would be:
"In this piece I used ...........( name the media used)................... Because......."

My first group I had write out sentences in full on a separate lined paper and use the key words below to help them answer the questions.
My second group I had them use the key words to just fill in the handout directly.
When comparing the answers I noticed more students from my second group had a greater number of incorrect answers than the first who wrote the answers in full sentences. I also realised that my first group took longer to complete the writing than I expected. I am assuming the writing in full sentences has a big part of this but I also think that the students took their time to accurately read and answer the questions thoroughly. In the future I will have my students write out their answers in full (rough) before I check/ correct it and then have them rewrite on their study sheets in good.
I hope this helps with any others and if you have any other tips or tricks I'd like to hear from you.
Most of my sentence starters can be found in my store: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Annotations-and-writing-frames-for-drawings-sculpture-and-more

Thanks
Mark

Sunday 4 November 2012

Sea Life Art Project (sculpture)

What would your students think if you were to turn your classroom (or a section of it) into a submarine portal looking out onto a vast array of sea life and extrordinary creatures?