Teaching Strategies
The basis for this unit is to understand how main ideas and supporting details function within a story. Many students come into HHS reading well below grade level and have previously decided that reading is not for them. It is my job to create a classroom that instills the major ACT College and Career Readiness Standards for Reading: Main Idea/Author's Approach, Supporting Details; Sequential, Comparative, and Cause-Effect Relationships; Meanings of Words; and Generalizations and Conclusions. Each of these standards feeds off the other and are taught best out of isolation. With each painting or photograph, students will attempt to synthesize all of the skills to produce a final story that demonstrates their understanding of each skill set.
Since most students vocally challenge a reading assignment, the emphasis is not on actual words but pictures. Students will read the painting or photograph to tell the story. I feel this is a non-threatening approach to reading. If students can read the painting or photograph, they can realize success. Once they realize this success, they can move on to reading with text.
They will use various pieces of art such as paintings and photographs to place themselves, as a storyteller, in the stories of the eras. This unit will be presented in a backward fashion. They will not receive the history until after they have determined the stories. My philosophy is that reading art is like writing the story backward because the story is what the student creates based on what s/he is seeing. S/he is the author of the painting's story. There is no right or wrong story. However, students will have to use elements of the background to determine and provide supporting details within their stories. They will also use the people in the artwork to defend character traits that help them to generalize what is happening in their stories. Once the stories are created, students will be given the background knowledge to assess whether they were able to accurately capture the painting or photograph. They will also use this knowledge to build a portfolio of good propaganda for the good of their neighborhood. Within these portfolios will be writing samples that demonstrate their abilities to write based on picture analysis.
This unit will allow students to characterize from a different angle. We will analyze several paintings that span 1776-1914 with a focus on war and its aftermath, which will lead us thirty years forward to World War II and the reading of Night by Elie Wiesel in the next unit. By using paintings from former wars and eras, students will gradually become comfortable with reading the characters as well as learning to empathize with another person's hardships. Each painting will have a small section displayed on the screen for each day. Generally, the small section will be a scene-within-a-scene. The remainder of the painting will not be viewable until the end of the week. Students will study the characters to determine what has happened or what is going to happen, what the people might be thinking, and what feelings the painter is trying to convey. Students will be given a window of time to make these judgments. Once the window has closed, students will work in their small groups to discuss their analyses and write their summaries. Once we have analyzed the parts of the painting, I will display the entire painting and have students compare their analyses with the whole picture. I will also provide students with the written, professional summary of the paintings to help the students compare and contrast their thoughts with the painter. These analyses will become a part of the students' unit portfolios.
Students will also view and analyze propaganda caricatures of war. With these caricatures, students will learn to define and identify propaganda and its effects on the public. They will create propaganda caricatures based on the paintings they are viewing and analyzing. The propaganda piece will take place at the end of the unit and will provide the anchor of the student unit portfolio.
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