fun with calligrams

My 6th-8th graders had a great time with calligrams this fall. They got really into it this year....I attribute three changes I made to this years lesson and a T.V. show.

Changes this year:
This year I if they were going to do an object I had them go look up how to say that object in six different languages. They really liked that. This girl also looked up how to say the different parts of a car in different languages.

I also said they could expand from a poem or text that they wrote to other variety of text such as song lyrics (clean version) which a lot of kids choose to do

and dialogue from a movie was another popular choice

Change three was that I got micro thin sharpies along with my thin felt tip markers. The kids felt they had better control of their lettering with the super thin sharpies.

The we had the kids that stuck with with words that described the object in English only

Man do they love the new Dr. Who

Then some 7th grade work:

and some 6th graders

 proof that using just the name of the object but a variety of text size can be very effective 

and the finally there is a show on PBS kids called Word World that has uses very basic calligrams and quite a few kids mentioned when I introduced the lesson.

Alphabesties lesson

Click photos to enlarge...till I can figure out how to make them big

About a month ago I posted about a "new to me," book I found in the typography section of the library. The book is called Alphabesties: and other amazing types. Each page of the book features a animal that is made up of the first letter of that animals name. Different types of fonts are used to create the animals. The animals in the book are great and each page shows several fonts that go with that animal and get students thinking about how text and type can create an image.

I know you could do some great lessons with photoshop or maybe even picnik and different types of fonts. I don't have access to our schools one computer lab so that is not an option for me...but I would love to see what someone else (with more comp knowledge than me) could come up with.

Instead I saw this book as a way to incorporate writing not only into our art class, but also into the artwork itself. For the second year in a row our 1 school improvement goal is to improve student writing. The other elective teachers and I keep getting dinged on our evaluations for not doing enough writing instruction in our classrooms. (Like I have a ton of time in 20 min classes...)

I did this lesson with 2nd - 7th grade students and they were equally interested with it. It got pretty quiet in my classroom as student had to think how to turn letters and words into images. I did break out my two sets of stencils for this project so that students could focus on the text aspect of the image and we could get done in a timely manor.

For this project each student choose an animal stencil (older students could use two)
Students could use pencil to outline their animal but then had to switch to marker. I asked students to fill in their animal using the first letter of the animals name (2nd grade) or the name of the animal, or a combo of both. Then students were asked to create the environment that their animal lived in using the name of the object. So the sun was drawn using the word sun, waves were drawn using the word wave and so on. Some classes created a boarder using their own name. It was easy to adapt this lesson to different grade levels and the younger students got great handwriting practice and were challenged to use their problem solving skills. I'm afraid I was too sick to get photos of the lower grade work before I let them take them home (and they wanted to keep them for once!) but I did get photos of some 5th-7th grade works.

***I also left this as a sub plan and got equally nice results, so I think this would make a great sub lesson since many grades can do it and it takes minimal materials. I have also found a fun set of Alphabesties flashcards that make a big puzzle. I think these would make a great addition to the classroom and would work just as well as the book.*********