Shades of Meaning

In last week's activity, I formally assessed that my students a. need help writing complete sentences, b. need time to create their own sentences, instead of copying what I say or what they see on the board and c. they can see what element/principle is used in an artwork, but they need practice describing how it's used.  

I get a lot of:  "The artist used line, shape and color."  "The artist used line to make the rocks."  "The artist used color in the fish."

So, I did some research and found a Content Literacy activity I wanted to try "Shades of Meaning".  I had some paintcolor bookmarks from Home Deport that I cut in half and passed out to each group.  We reviewed and listed the elements and principles on the board, then I let each group pick one.  They wrote the E/P in the first box, then we looked at an artwork and they wrote adjectives in the other boxes describing the E/P in the artwork.  (This took awhile).  Then, we passed around the paint chips and groups got to write sentences based on the adjectives from another group.  

I think in the future, I will have artworks placed on the walls with descriptive sentences next to them, or make a powerpoint of some artworks and students write the sentences as we talk about them.  

Here are the paint chips from the activity.  If I had enough, I might give each student a paintchip as well, not just the group.  Time to stock up  :)