Although drawing and doodling are often associated with elementary education, these techniques shouldn't be dismissed as mere child's play. Rather, drawing and doodling are powerful tools for facilitating learning and building connection between students in the world language classroom. Students of all kinds -- from five-year olds to 50-year olds -- have something to gain by rendering drawings with pencil and paper as they take on learning a new language. The act of drawing can help students build memorable and personal connections to language. What's more, playful drawing exercises give students a way to share something of themselves. Similar to handwriting, doodles have a distinctively personal stamp. The way students represent figures, cars, or animals is unique to them. Through art making and sharing, students are able to recognize and enjoy each other's artistic quirks, while also developing a strong visual understanding of new words. One of my favorite drawing activities to use in the world language classroom is called Visual Notetaking. Visual Notetaking is something that can be done while listening to a story, a student interview or really any kind of auditory input. Visual Notetaking focuses on doodles, symbols, arrows, X’s, emojis, stick figures -- anything that provides a visual representation of what a student is understanding. ➡️ 🚳 ☔ 🏖️😀 🐷 🦋 🍓 🍔 ⚽️ 🎮 🚘 ✈️ ⏰ 💜 🚫 Students can include some keywords during Visual Notetaking -- writing isn't forbidden -- but primarily their page should be filled with doodles. This little exercise is really my nod to the kid who loves to doodle in their notebook during class, the kid who needs to keep their hand busy in order to concentrate -- I was that kid! To administer this activity, hand out blank paper and pencils, then cue up some audio. I recommend letting students listen to several lines of audio, then stopping the recording so they can draw freely. Hit play again and maybe even repeat a portion of the audio they just heard. You could choose to only do one two-minute excerpt or you could choose to do several excerpts. One caveat for Visual Notetaking is to pick a passage that has things that can be represented easily in a visual format, e.g., concrete vocab words or specific events. If people or characters are talking about their opinions or abstract concepts, it will be harder to do this exercise. I learned this truth the hard way by trying to do it with a recording of “Una experiencia inolvidable," a story in the Nuestra historia III curriculum by Voces Digital. In that story, the characters are talking about their opinions on art, and it didn’t translate well into doodling. So be mindful of what story you pick and even try it yourself first before leading the activity in class. In general, giving students a chance to draw their understanding of what they hear is a great way to focus their attention rather than having them feel intimidated by the sounds of another language and ultimately spacing out. Drawing is a great anchor in that way. Visual Notetaking can be used to get a sense of where students are before, during, or after engaging with content. After doing the exercise, one form of follow up is to put students in small groups to compare their doodles and share information back to the group. What images did they have in common? What was different? Another idea is to collect student work and say in the target language, “Hey! I noticed a lot of people picked up on the word _____” and show examples of what students drew on the document camera. Dogs tend to come up a lot in my Spanish class, and students very much enjoy viewing each others' renderings of dogs, especially ones that look like primitive stick figures! Some teachers have asked me whether this kind of sharing can be problematic -- do the students who lack so-called artistic talent get teased? Do people make fun of their contributions? The answer comes down to classroom culture. In all the ways you've been encouraging students to be supportive, openminded, and connected during other activities, the same goes here. I find that the naturally gifted students receive a lot of praise, but there is also real appreciation for the cleverness and originality of unrefined work because it manages to get the point across -- and sometimes even better than the aesthetically pleasing drawings! Student art can bring real joy, laughter, and fun into the classroom. I'm hopeful to present more on the topic of Drawing and Doodling -- perhaps at #NECTFL2024! I'm on the waitlist for now. If I present, I'll demo this activity as I did at #RIFLA in October. (Update! My RIFLA session was "Best of Rhode Island" this year, so I will be presenting at NECTFL afterall!) An hour session goes by fast, but there are many more drawing activities that I have up my sleeve that I want to demo with teachers. I'm thinking Crazy Sentences, Pictionary Mania, and 9 Panel Comic. I'm also contemplating adding more of these types of activities to a new chapter in the next edition of A Teacher's Guide to Our Story. Art is a powerful tool in the classroom and there is so much to say.
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