I am currently taking a class on educational media. For our last assignment, we were asked to create a Word Cloud from a Website called Wordle. Since I am an art teacher and studying art education, I decided to create a word cloud consisting of art terms. I entitled my word cloud An Artist's Words.
As I went through the assignment, I began to think of a lesson I had previously done in my classroom that was similar. The lesson was called Shape Poems. This is where I would have my students decide on an object that would like to create (ex. a bird, a football, etc.) and then use words that describe the object to create the shape of the object. Many of the students enjoyed the project, but what they got most of out of it was discovering how to use multiple words to describe something. This challenged their minds to go through the lists of vocabulary they knew. Some students had trouble finding words, so their classmates would help them. This opened the door to a collaborative effort to learn new words.
Can you see how word clouds could be used in the classroom to challenge students in the same way as shape poems? My goal as an art educator is to show the link between what we learn in the art classroom to what the students are studying in other subjects. This lesson in particular is an excellent way to show the connection between language arts and art education. But could it be used to show the connection between other academic subjects?
