In Picturing Learning, Karen Ernst introduced teachers to her classroom's artists workshop, revealing what a valuable role the visual can play in children's literacy development. Now, with the publication of A Teacher's Sketch Journal, Ernst takes teachers one step further as she focuses on the thinking and meaning behind the pictures and the words.
This book provides a unique glimpse inside Ernst's sketch journal, in which readers can watch her teach, reflect on her observations, and see samples of her students' pictures and writing. Beginning with the understanding that children have stories to tell and to picture, she shows how to link art with reading, writing, and learning in the classroom, takes art into the writers workshop and across the curriculum, and establishes an important partnership with classroom teachers and parents.
Readers will discover how to use a picture as a springboard to writing, build a classroom community, form teacher study groups, introduce student sketch journals, take trips to museums, set up classroom and school galleries, establish routines, and organize the classroom studio. But Ernst does not provide prescriptions, she invites you to translate the ideas into your own. She also lets you in on some of her solutions to difficult questions: how to offer children choices, how to achieve a balance between writing and drawing while teaching the skills and techniques of each, and how to integrate the curriculum authentically.
Ernst believes that teachers must engage in the literacies they are teaching, collaborate with their colleagues, and create ideas for change, not merely facilitate someone else's. This book will help preservice and practicing teachers, curriculum specialists, special education professionals, researchers, and parents do the same.
KAREN ERNST's work grows out of her many years as a middle level English teacher and her current work as the art teacher at Kings Highway Elementary School in Westport, Connecticut, where she developed the artists workshop. She also directs a project to help teachers use art and of writing across the curriculum and facilitates a teacher research group that calls itself Community Teachers Learning. Picturing Learning: Artists & Writers in the Classroom (Heinemann, 1994) tells the story of her work in art and writing. Karen Ernst's conducts hands-on, practical workshops based on her belief that learning must be theory and practice, the why and how of learning in order to help teachers translate ideas into their own life and classroom practice. She consults on writers' workshop, teacher research, the artists' workshop and how to infuse art into learning across the curriculum to help meet the needs of diverse learners and learning styles.
