I have amazing students, they are talented and gifted in more ways than I can probably articulate. As such, I wanted to create assignments that allowed those who wanted to explore their creative side the opportunity to do so. With that being said, I made sure that those whose drawing lends itself more to my type of drawing (stick people) knew that the ability to draw or be creative was not required in order to be successful on a particular assignment. Rather, I tried to create assignments that gave the learners agency over their expression.
When reading The Marrow Thieves in English First Peoples, I had students create ‘character cards’. For these cards, they needed to draw a picture of something that represented the character(s) be that, a physical feature, reoccurring image, item they used often, or the character themselves. They then needed to find physical and personality traits for the character(s) that they had chosen, and examples/quotations from the text that supported these traits.
We also worked with creating Blackout Poetry. That is when you take a piece of text and blackout words and phrases to create a new piece of poetry.
