The bigger picture
This lesson came as a surprise to me, almost, because, initially, I was not planning on including it in our curriculum. I just wanted a story lesson, around ‘Splat the Cat and the Cat in the Moon’ but as soon as we started to deal with, ideas kept popping up everywhere, sometimes because the kids made their jokes about the characters or because they didn’t understand and asked a question. Or, also, because I noticed something that I could just drag out into the spotlight…
All of that was one amazing experience and this is how, instead of one lesson, we ended up with three: the story lesson, the punctuation lesson and the speaking lesson I am describing here and the intonation lesson I would love to do a bit later.
This lesson here, I owe to my amazing student, Sasha (it is always ‘a Sasha’) who, on leaving the classroom, already in the doorway, stopped, turned around and ask: ‘Why did Splat insist on seeing the cat in the moon? There ARE only craters there!’ And there, in the doorway, we got into a discussion about different points of view and how Plank looked at the moon as a scientist and Splat, he was definitely more of an artist…And at this point, right there, I knew I had to make a lesson out of it.
The activities
This lesson lasted 45 minutes and this is what we filled it up with:
- we started with our regular hello routine: saying hello, singing the January song, talking about how we were and revision
- I introduced the concept of the point of view with the great images from www.stockadobe.com and the kids got is straight away. From the very beginning I wanted to include the questions that we would be using throughout the lesson (‘Who is right?’ and ‘Who is wrong?’). The images are so poignant that I turned them into a poster to put up on the wall of our classroom, to remind us, for now and for always, that we have different points of view and that we all respect that.
- The next stage was devoted to symbolic representation and different ways of looking at the same symbol. We covered a similar topic in our Art Explorers with some of my students in a lesson devoted to Henri Rousseau. There we did it with ‘a tiger’. In our English lesson we talked about the different ways of representing ‘the sun’, to go along the space topic of the storybook. We looked at the images (presentation, slide 4) and talked about their origin and which ones were our favourite.
- The aim of the following activity was to practise noticing two of the points of view represented in the story, this of a scientist (Plank) and this of an artist (Splat). The children looked at all of the images and they were to guess or decide which outlook they represent and whether they liked them, too (slides 7 to 13). This was also when we discussed if we are more scientists or artists in the way we see the world.
- Finally, we got down to our little creative stage. It was divided two sections, the first one based on the storybook in which the children had to draw the moon as seen by the scientist, the artist and the chef (one more idea that I owe to my students, too). In the second part, the students could choose their own object and represent it in the way that a scientst would see it and an artist would. The third choice was up to them.
- In the end, we looked at all the pictures and we put them up on the walls.
The teacher reflects
- This was a speaking lesson and students could produce a fair amount of language, especially expressing opinion and justifying them. They have lots of great ideas.
- I loved it how some of my kids went directly for one of the ways (‘I am a scientist’, ‘I am an artist’) whereas the others were absolutely decisive about not willing to choose any (‘It depends!’ or ‘Sometimes I like to be a scientist, sometimes I like to be an artist’).
- I was really happy that we could do a bit of drawing. We did this lesson on the day of the big Maths test and this was perfect, to balance the serious and hard work.
- I loved discovering how they chose to represent their symbols and what other creative choices they made. Some of the pictures are just amazing.
- As I have already mentioned the idea of ‘a point of view’ is a very necessary in our group and I am hoping that our new poster will help us deal with different issues in our lessons.
- It was our English lesson but I can definitely see how I could easily turn it into an Art lesson or just include it into any ESL / EFL course, for example with jobs, space or food.
- Some of my kids needed a bit more time to focus and to make decisions about their drawings so, I think, next time I do it, I will be cutting up all of the handouts into smaller tasks and giving them out, one by one and then glueing them onto a card (or into the notebook) so that everyone does as many as possible. Especially that one of my kids wanted to do more, too and she asked for an additional handout. More flexibility!
If you ever have a chance to use these ideas, please let me know!
Happy teaching!