Teaching English Through Art

Incorporating art into English - particularly writing - can be both a motivational tool and useful for increasing a student's understanding and retention. Teaching English Through Art provides solid coverage of all aspects of writing for middle schoolers - parts of sentences, kinds of sentences, sentence structure, paragraph structure, types of paragraphs, story-writing, dialogue, literary devises, creating mood, letters, poetry, and biographical sketches. Rather than detailed instruction in each of these areas, art examples are provided that illustrate or stage a situation and the student is encouraged to expand from the example into original composition. Take for instance, the lesson on caricature. Visually, as an art example, we're familiar with this type of cartoon-like drawing of a person's face. However, a character in a story can be a caricature as well, exhibiting an extreme of personality or behavior. While people with exaggerated personality traits exist in real life, it's in writing that they're most prevalent, and learning to identify caricatures as well as produce them can be a valuable skill.

The author, Sharon Jeffus, is both an art instructor and a former English teacher. The student is expected to compile a Writing Portfolio based on suggestions/assignments from the course. Coverage is broad in terms of writing, covering all the essential strands of writing plus a smattering of mechanics. This 90 page course could be used as the writing component of an English/Language Art course or it could be used as a once a week or occasional supplement to your traditional program. It would be a good break from a traditional program and could be used with several children at one time. ~ Janice