In a message dated 9/9/2007 11:14:18 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [log in to unmask] writes:

Could you explain how you are doing this? I am going to be getting into sentence structure soon and thought I might try your idea.

The sentence part art is from Harry Noden's book Image Grammar. If you don't have the book, I highly recommend it. He has a number of "brush strokes" that he developed with his eighth graders to improve writing. (I'm going back to it, as it was too advanced for my sixth graders, and I'm now teaching older students.) It is chock full of art that comes on a CD, plus he has a website with even more art. His primary focus (I hope I'm remembering this right - I haven't pulled out my copy for review for a while) is to encourage students to vary their sentence structure. He shows great models to the students and then they try various strategies.

One of my students' favorites was noun absolutes. I'd put up a picture from the CD of cars at the starting line of a race. The kids would write down all the noun absolutes they could think of from the picture - "engines racing, the cars edged towards the starting line" or "checkered flag waving, the starter leans towards the track." They really enjoyed the crossover between art and writing.

I'm going to take that same idea and make it even more simple for my phobic kids (they wouldn't know a noun absolute if one walked up and bit them, but they're game for anything right now!) I'm going to use pictures to generate simple subjects and predicates. They really don't know the difference. Then we'll expand each part slowly and carefully with the parts of speech that they are learning now.

I have a number of different ideas for this. I have some of those inspirational posters with people doing various sports type activities (climbing glaciers, surfing, etc.) that I thought I'd use to teach prepositional phrases; directional ones are always easiest, and what guy wouldn't like to find 8 different prepositional phrases in a football poster? I'll keep the group posted if anyone is interested.