Rationale
From my morning check-in with my students, I find that my students love sharing about themselves to their peers and me, whether it is eagerly sharing about their birthday through ecstatic anecdotes about their birthday parties (which seems to happen every day), or sharing what is happening in their family through picture drawing. My students all love to express themselves, though they differ in their unique stories and their cultures. Since many of my students find text writing challenging, they share their lives orally and through drawing pictures. They are experts on their life, even at a young age, through methods of expression that they know best. Through this unit, I hope to add to my students’ academic repertoire through the connection between the arts and writing.
At the beginning of the school year, I was using Benchmark curriculum. The writing instructions focused on responding to the reading, such as labeling the main idea of the story. While there is value in responding to reading, I saw that my students were not enthusiastic about writing: their heads were lying on one arm, their eyes droopy, and their pencils barely moving. That was a sign of boredom that was agony for me as a teacher. Furthermore, Benchmark did not provide an explicit bridge between picture writing and text writing—something that I believe needs to be provided, since picture writing is one of young children’s strengths. This made writing challenging for many of my students, especially for those who entered the class with little writing background.
I see the obstacle of finding the ‘right’ curriculum and the absence of an art teacher as an opportunity to finally put the arts in Language Arts into action. This means that the arts do not have to be done in isolation from the core content, in this case writing. Instead, the arts and writing can work together. Taking into account my students’ strength in picture writing and their eagerness to share their experiences, this unit will focus on the interlaced relationship between the arts and writing for students to express themselves. This will hopefully enable them to find writing meaningful. The content of this unit will explore young children’s picture writing and text writing development, historical connections that view arts and writing as intertwined, and what education research says about using arts in writing. The activities for this unit will help students view and engage writing as a form of art.
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