Should the artist be instructed to draw randomly or with six panels? I say that the drawings should be contained in six (horizontal) panels. The artist draws what they hear during the story or the PQA – it doesn’t matter – through the six panels, numbering each one (1 through 3 across the top and 4 through 6 across the bottom).
In my classroom, this is done on the back of that big rolling white board with two sides. I do this because it brings the readings much closer physically to the class than the somewhat distant boards, since people who design classrooms don’t always put the white boards in the best places.
Of course, many of us just use a document camera or an overhead projector to create the six panels. If using a doc camera, the artist simply folds a piece of paper in half the long way and then into thirds to create six boxes, then places the paper sideways and draws.
Of course, in terms of assessment, and this is why I moved this into a blog post from a comment, so that we could have it under the assessment category, don’t forget that you can have the six panel image in front of the class on the white board or on the document camera or whatever and the quiz would be that you say a sentence and they have to write down the number of the panel.
You don’t even have to write the questions in advance, just the anwer for grading. Just look at the six panels and say a simple sentence from class that contains one of the high frequency words used in that class so that they succeed and the to answer the question the kids just write the number of the panel you just described. An assistant does the grading and you get an easy grade in the book.
This is the kind of easy formative almost daily assessment that, I believe, is the way to go. Of course, nothing beats the easy yes/no scantron quizzes at the end of class that were written during class by the quiz writer superstar. Those save us so much time. No longer must we labor under the utterly false assumption that teachers have to spend their evenings grading tests and papers. That is all so over under the new flag of comprehension based methods.
The Problem with CI
Jeffrey Sachs was asked what the difference between people in Norway and in the U.S. was. He responded that people in Norway are happy and
3 thoughts on “Formative Assessment Using Drawings”
I LOVE this quiz idea! I always have an artist, but I don’t have her draw in panels . That will change tomorrow. I thought of using butcher paper instead of a whiteboard because the students are so sad when I have to erase the picture to prep for the next class. They want to hold on to these hilarious drawings.
I have sometimes taken pictures of their drawings with my phone.
You can use mini whiteboards to do this too–I had my kids draw pictures to illustrate a song, then took pictures of the best boards and projected the pictures for a quiz over the song contents. I also used pictures of individual panels for a PowerPoint with the song’s words and now we’re in the second year of using that PowerPoint as the next group learns the song.