Drawing Days
It’s a good idea to let kids draw in class to prepare their ICIs. You need high quality drawings that badly. They are that important.
During drawing time, students should be encouraged to look at the Gallery (a section of wall in the back of the room) of One Word Images and other ICIs and emulate the class artists’ best work in drawing their Invisibles—big, bold, images that are almost like a logo for the character.
It is best to coach them to use bold markers for the outlines and crayons or colored pencils to shade and color their characters. Any great artists in the room can be asked to help coach.
If anyone walks in and demands to know why high school kids are coloring in class tell them you’ll explain it to them later, that you’re busy cracking open the geode of best practices in your field.
The drawings must include the following six pieces of information on the back.
name
job
likes/dislikes
fear
problem
secret
No matter the level of your class, it is recommended to allow students to create their backstories in L1. It is a more creative experience for them, and you will get more buy-in and authenticity that way. Even third and fourth year students will be stifled in their creativity if they have to limit the backstories to their L2 ability.
Plus, the L1 terms that they use are words they likely want to learn because it is their character and by extension THEM! It is a wonderful way for us to learn what our students’ interests are and expose them to language that they genuinely want to know. As a non-native speaker, I often find that I have to consult wordreference.com to translate a term or two here and there, and thus I too grow my L2 vocabulary.
We can allow the students to have part of class or even an entire class to simply sit and draw characters. Why not? If you are tired one day, and what teacher is not, take a rest with a drawing day!
This is a time of trust building and friendly conversation that further cements bonds of trust and friendship in the classroom. The time spent in L1 drawing in class will repay you over and over in student engagement and interest during stories.
Whenever the teacher feels like giving drawing time in class, the kids happily take it. In those periods, the classroom bursts with creativity. Connections are made, friendships grow, and laughs and smiles are the order of the day. The time “given up” to draw characters in class is repaid with generous dividends of student interest during subsequent stories.
While drawing, the students usually form little groups of two or three and the feeling is of lighthearted anticipation with heads together. Visible group pride takes over. English is used. That’s fine. The students are finding friends and the class is becoming a team with a purpose. Safety and inclusion are becoming normal in the class.
Don’t forget the visits to the Gallery on the back wall, where images for all your classes are posted. This is a good time to rally the class to higher levels of artistic achievement and remind them of the aesthetics of a successful Invisible: a big, bold, colorful design that acts as a logo or icon, not a detailed portrait.