Rationale
I teach art at a magnet high school in New Haven, High School in the Community (HSC). HSC serves three hundred and fifty students, two-thirds residing in New Haven and one-third residing in the surrounding suburbs. An astonishing percentage of our students arrive at HSC reading below grade level, many of them far below grade level. Both this statistic and the new CAPT mandates are forcing us to find new ways to incorporate reading and writing across the disciplines with the curriculum of my subject area: elements and principles of design. I am teaching this course, Picture This, as a way to fulfill both of these needs. The course will be taught to a class of students that range from ninth to twelfth grade. It will be taught as a quarter class and I will the students everyday for about ten weeks. Students will read and analyze a variety of different versions of Cinderella, The Three Little Pigs, and Little Red Riding Hood while having a variety of other fairy tales available to them. I hope that if I provide students with literature that is not intimidating, they can focus on themes and construction rather than worrying about comprehension. Hopefully this will allow them to do a much more comprehensive analysis of the text, teaching them skills which they can later apply to more difficult texts. Students will also be challenged to compare a variety of different styles of illustration — from line drawing to cut paper to watercolor, etc. Students will discuss how viewing illustrations changes your perception of a story, and how simple compositional elements can easily express an idea. Once students have read and looked at a variety of different versions of the text they will be asked to create their own definition of a fairy tale - identifying key elements that are present in each story they have read. They will then be challenged to write and illustrate their own fairy tale, including all of the key elements they have identified.
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