Teaching students about images in literature involves helping them identify it in texts, exploring it through games, and experimenting with creating it themselves. Students should learn to distinguish between cliches and vivid images and understand that strong images use unusual verbs and specific nouns. A game using cards can be a great way to teach pictures, where students find unusual combinations of verbs and nouns to create visual images.
One of the tasks facing a literature teacher is how to get students to really visualize the characters and actions of a story or to understand how a simile or images of a metaphor contribute to the deep meaning of a poem. Teaching about images to students, whether it’s young children who can barely see over their desks or their big teenage or college siblings, is a matter of helping them identify it in texts, explore it through games, and experiment with creating it themselves. . Teaching pictures using a little fun coupled with a little imagination will help students rethink the world around them and the worlds created in literature.
In literature, an image is simply something that can be viewed. Students often confuse the idea of an image with a cliché. Indeed, many clichés first came to life as images vivid enough to capture the imagination, but through constant use, their visual appeal has diminished. In the days before burglar alarms, when many homes had a canine sentry, describing someone’s “bark” as “worse than their bite” was visually evocative, bringing to mind a neighbor’s ferocious Rottweiler who was just a gentle puppy on the street. internal. Asking students to draw a visual image of a cliché or two helps them recognize that such everyday sayings were once true images.
The next step is for students to find vivid and unexpected images in a story or poem that the class is reading or that the students are reading to themselves. When students understand that a strong image makes the reader forget that the story is just words on a page that suddenly, magically transform, teaching images by asking students to look up their use makes sense. Students may notice that strong images often use unusual verbs and very specific nouns. For example, a torn plastic bag inflating in a sudden gust of wind and rattling in a parking lot offers an image that suggests impending drama. If the author simply reported that the garbage was being swept up, the reader might easily not even notice.
Kids like games and teachers like games that teach kids. A simple game using cards can be a great way to teach pictures. A teacher and her students can brainstorm a long list of vivid verbs, ignoring stands such as “talk,” “sit,” or “walk” in favor of “mumble,” “slouch,” “preen,” and dozens of other verbs that suggest an image.
The list should contain at least 50 words, which is actually not as difficult as it might seem. Each verb is printed on a blue card. Another set of 50 items is printed on white cardstock.
Students can be organized in teams or associates. The goal is for students to find as many unusual combinations as possible that make sense and create a visual image. For example, the shadow of a leafless tree might appear to wobble in the moonlight, or a rollerblading artist might dangle in the air. After students have had the opportunity to work with others to create these images, they can try creating images on their own.
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