Persuasive Writing/River Model Brochure

Cindy's account below of Friday is thorough. Here are some more pictures of what happened on the art side. I started off by showing the students an exemplar I'd made. I explained that for a brochure, we want it to be eyecatching as well as interesting to read. You can persuade people with words, but you can also persuade them with colors and images. I told them about each of the steps for the project and that they'd start once their final draft was ready. The students have practice with a "centers" activity format in the classroom with individual groups doing separate activities, which equipped them well with the more organic flow of work that occurred on Friday. When I arrived, most of the students had reached final draft stage of the persuasive writing for their brochures. In the back of the room I set up a station for the distribution of watercolor sets and paper for creating a colored background on 2 sides of a page for the brochure. As students were ready they came back to me, I demoed the instructions very quickly and told them what to do when they were finished. When the painting stage was complete I had students clean up the watercolor sets and set aside their page to dry while they created a drawing for the interior of the brochure. I asked students to read what they wrote and if/when a mental image came to mind in response to what they had written to create an illustration drawing from that mental image.

Bailey draws an illustration for her brochure

When their drawing was complete and their page dry, students came back to the stamping station to create a border for the interior and exterior of their brochure. In the original description to the whole class we mentioned that "border" and "frame" mean similar things. I asked them whether their river showed a rural, suburban, or urban community and whether they could find stamps that would relate to their model and writing.

Students work on stamping their borders- they loved this part!

 When stamping was complete, I had them fold the page in half, glue a picture of their river model to the front cover, and create a bold colorful title. Then they were to bring their draft to Cindy for a final edit before copying their text to the lined page with their drawing. A few students reached the very last step, which was to cut out the text and drawing to glue into the interior of the brochure.



Daniella shows off her front cover: "Visit the Swan River!"

The classroom was a hive of focused activity. It's a bit hard to wrap my head around managing 24 kids at staggered points in a process, but it worked. There was no down-time or boredom happening. And the staggered aspect meant I actually had a lot of one-on-one interactions with the students.

We'll be heading back into fiber arts next week as we begin elements of our big collaborative piece and focus more specifically on the Delaware River.