Bringing Writing and Literacy with Art to Life!

Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.

In my classroom the emphasis on literacy not only in fiction but also in nonfiction has been a new and exciting topic for my third grade students, as they are just now embarking on their lives as readers and writers. This year my students have been writing and reading personal narratives, experiencing the challenges of research projects and using art to inspire their creative writing. I would like to bring all of these projects to life by punctuating them with a videocamera that films and takes still photos for two specific uses (though I am sure there are many more just waiting to be discovered!). First, the students are immersing themselves in nonfiction material in order to increase their sophistication with material that can be (for most of them) less 'interesting' than the fiction books they read in second grade (Dr. Seuss and encyclopedias are simply not comparable in their minds, not that I blame them). For their own nonfiction writing (either personal narratives or 'how to' books), their published pieces lack real photographs and captions (major features of nonfiction material). Though their writing is improving and their enthusiasm still encouraging, I feel that they would see their writing as more sophisticated and truly 'published' if they could insert photographs to highlight their writing. Second, I have been using art to bring my students to a different understanding of a variety of literature--advertisements and visual culture they see regularly--and inspire them to write creatively. Currently we are working on propaganda posters. I would like to extend this project into the study of the propaganda of film. Like all children, my students are constantly exposed to and absorbing visual media. If I could plan a video propaganda project with them, I believe that their critical thinking skills could be directed at better understanding how the media works (how it affects people's thoughts, actions, beliefs) and manipulates viewers by writing, explaining and then creating, their own commercials. Scrutinizing the popular culture in which they are continually immersed may serve them well not only as third grade students but as they continue along in their academic and personal lives. Therefore, I would really love to have a camera that would capture images to brighten up (and to help make them more proud of) their nonfiction writing and function in the visual propaganda project mentioned above. There are a variety of these and I would be happy with any version! The Canon camera I found would be perfect as it could easily be used with the iMac computers available at my school, and my kids could learn how to operate it as well.