Sunday, November 16, 2014

The Little Land by Robert Louis Stevenson

My students will be reading the poem
The Little Land by Robert Louis Stevenson.
First they will read and interpret the poem without illustrations and tell me what they think it means. Then they will look at the illustrations below as we read the poem as a class and, drawing from their own experiences, either from books or movies, tell me if their ideas on the meaning of the poem have changed. We will discuss movies they are familiar with, such as 'A Bug's Life' and 'Honey I Shrunk The Kids'. We will then discuss how illustrations help the reader to visualize the meaning of a poem. Using the reference materials provided by the teacher, students will then envision themselves as being very small. They will create an illustration of what the world would look like from an insect's point of view.

English Language Arts Standards,Reading: Literature

http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RL/5/

Colored Pencil drawing by Rachel Wintemberg, The Helpful Art Teacher

When at home alone I sit

And am very tired of it,

I have just to shut my eyes

To go sailing through the skies--

Illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith

To go sailing far away

To the pleasant Land of Play;

To the fairy land afar

Where the Little People are;

Where the clover-tops are trees,

And the rain-pools are the seas,

And the leaves, like little ships,

Sail about on tiny trips;

And above the Daisy tree

Through the grasses,

High o'erhead the Bumble Bee

Hums and passes.

In that forest to and fro

I can wander, I can go;

See the spider and the fly,

And the ants go marching by,

Watercolor by Rachel Wintemberg

Carrying parcels with their feet

Down the green and grassy street.

Illustration by Gertrude Elliot

I can in the sorrel sit

Where the ladybird alit.

I can climb the jointed grass

And on high

See the greater swallows pass

In the sky,

Drawing by Rachel Wintemberg,The Helpful Art Teacher

And the round sun rolling by

Heeding no such things as I.

Through that forest I can pass

Till, as in a looking-glass,

Humming fly and daisy tree

And my tiny self I see,

Painted very clear and neat

On the rain-pool at my feet.

Watercolor by Rachel Wintemberg, The Helpful Art Teacher

Should a leaflet come to land

Drifting near to where I stand,

Watercolor by Rachel Wintemberg

Straight I'll board that tiny boat

Round the rain-pool sea to float.

Illustration by Julie C. Pratt

Little thoughtful creatures sit

On the grassy coasts of it;

Little things with lovely eyes

See me sailing with surprise.

Some are clad in armour green--

(These have sure to battle been!)--

Some are pied with ev'ry hue,

Black and crimson, gold and blue;

Watercolor by Rachel Wintemberg

Some have wings and swift are gone;--

But they all look kindly on.

Watercolor by Rachel Wintemberg, The Helpful Art Teacher

When my eyes I once again

Open, and see all things plain:

High bare walls, great bare floor;

Great big knobs on drawer and door;

Great big people perched on chairs,

Stitching tucks and mending tears,

Each a hill that I could climb,

And talking nonsense all the time--

Illustration by Arthur Rackham

O dear me,

That I could be

A sailor on a the rain-pool sea,

A climber in the clover tree,

And just come back a sleepy-head,

Late at night to go to bed.

Illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith

How can asking students to illustrate a poem help them to become not only better artists but better writers?

Studying writing that evokes clear visual imagery and invites readers to explore the imagination, like the Robert Louis Stevenson poem above, is key to helping students become both better artists and better writers.

Resources:

The art/writing connection

How to Be a Better Writer:
6 Tips From Harvard’s Steven Pinker

http://time.com/3584611/write-better-tips-from-harvard/

Quotes from the Time Magazine article linked above:

"Our brain works a particular way; so what rules do we need to know to write the way the brain best understands?

Steven Pinker is a cognitive scientist and linguist at Harvard. He’s also on the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.

Steven was recently ranked as one of the top 100 most eminent psychologists of the modern era."

His number one piece of advice:

"Be Visual: One third of the human brain is dedicated to vision. So trying to make the reader “see” is a good goal and being concrete has huge effects."

Via The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century:

"We are primates, with a third of our brains dedicated to vision, and large swaths devoted to touch, hearing, motion, and space. For us to go from “I think I understand ” to “I understand ,” we need to see the sights and feel the motions. Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images…"

A key element to 'close reading' is inviting students to explore the visual imagery that a well written poem evokes in their minds. One way to explore this visual imagery is to draw it.

At the University of Pennsylvania, freshman students are taught how to do 'close readings' of classic pieces of literature.

Here is one piece of advice they are given their freshman year:

"METAPHORS and IMAGES:

Make a mental list of the images that pile up in passage.

How do these metaphors or images affect how you read?"

http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Teaching/101/closereading.html

The Helpful Art Teacher says; why not create that 'mental list' by illustrating a passage with a beautiful drawing? Students can demonstrate how closely they have read by including as much detail as possible.