Help My 1st Graders Use Pictures to Fuel Their Writing Voices!-Part II

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.

I am a first grade teacher for 20 students in a bilingual program. I work at a small charter school that serves a predominantly immigrant community. One of my goals as a teacher this year is to support my students' literacy development in creative and exciting ways. I would like to use photography as a means to motivate my students' writing. In my first proposal, I reqested twenty one cameras for my students to use to take pictures of their families, friends, and experiences. I really want to provide one more disposable camera for each of my students in order to provide more opportunities to take more pictures! I believe kids learn best when they feel fully connected to and directly impacted by what they are learning. Using photographs that they have taken themselves, my students will be extremely connected and motivated to write about their pictures. Students will use their pictures as they learn various processes of writing poetry. Poetry is the BEST writing genre to use with emerging writers for many reasons. Poetry allows students to express themselves beautifully in unconstrained ways. Writing poetry helps develop students' word knowledge, vocabulary, and love for writing! The disposable cameras will be important resources to support an interdisciplinary writing-arts project that I want to complete. The students will learn about various poetry writing processes. Concurrently, they will learn about photographers and artists that depict autobiographical and biographical themes. Then they will use that knowledge to take pictures of their families and their environment. After an exploration of poetry and these artistic works, I will guide the students in creating their own artistic and written masterpieces using their own photographs. I will use available technology to support this learning. I will use a multimedia projector to project student pictures for class discussions. The students will develop presentations using their pictures and the multimedia projector. I would like to have a final presentation ceremony in the form of an art exhibit in our classroom. Or maybe even in a local restaurant of coffee house! I currently have a classroom grant that will cover the film processing fees for such a project. I just need to obtain the hardware: cameras for the students! Providing each student with three cameras will give them a much larger supply of pictures to use as writing resources. Having an additional camera will give the students one more opportunity to use the photography skills that they will be learning and to be more deliberate about the content the third roll of pictures. This will definitely result in great photographs! I really want to provide one more disposable camera for each of my students!