::A Geek in Korea::

day, the book had this incredibly lame one page set of sentences describing a character in the book. Then the students were supposed to describe themselves. You will never get a class of young children describe themselves in front of their peers, so this is a non-starter as an exercise I can do in class.

I made up a paper today to do descriptions of people. I had an empty box, then a comic “text bubble” popping out that had a series of sentences describing a comic looking figure. Big fat people, or tall thin people with exaggerated features. The third box and text bubble was blank. I drew the first person according to their description in the text bubble, making it as big as the board would let me.

Next, I let the students read the text bubble for the second character and made sure they had their pictures started before I put up my own picture. I didn’t want them to just copy my picture every time. Some of them had hilarious variations of the picture I drew, while others went off into weirder directions.

The third picture was for the students to let their own imaginations fly and draw whatever they wanted. The only caveat was that they had to write the English FIRST. This means that if they wanted to draw something crazy, they needed the language and vocabulary to describe it. The students were asking how to spell all sorts of body parts, and were trying to get the grammar correct so they could get their picture drawn before someone ripped off their ideas. They had some really weird, funny, tremendously creative designs considering their limited vocabulary and grammar skills. (It only required “I have…” and “I am…” sentences.)

The students would go around the class showing off their pictures, laughing at each other’s drawings. Everyone was very positive and happy about whatever anyone made. Since they saw me drawing exaggerated caricatures, they knew I wasn’t going for artistic accuracy. I only cared if the ENGLISH was correct and roughly matched the picture. If they wanted to draw a monster instead of a person, they could. I think the students really liked that freedon.

Over my years of teaching, I’ve gotten many chances to improve on my dry eraser art skills. There are many activities I do that depend on the occasional sketch on the board to help my students understand what I am saying. I like to doodle, but I’m not an “artist” in any stretch of the word. I had students laughing hysterically at my drawings, and everyone got to show me what they could do on paper. It was a LOT of fun.

For homework, I assigned them the paragraph about writing a description of themselves. That way they can look up the words they want to describe themselves, and don’t have people making fun of them when I check the paper.