The Primary English Encyclopedia: The Heart of the Curriculum, Third Edition
See also advertisements, Bible, book making, carnival (and literacy), comics, history and English, illustrations, picture books, sacred texts, visual literacy
Art activities are an excellent context for learning a vocabulary to talk about making and creating things, to evaluate visual and tactile qualities, to develop understanding of how the visual and the verbal relate and to make explicit children’s ideas about how to make imaginative use of their experience. The ‘How Artists Use’ series helps children acquire a vocabulary about such visual concepts as shape, colour, pattern and texture and encourages them to talk about such concepts.
There is much potential for linking art with literacy both during Literacy Time and outside it. The picture books which are widely used and enjoyed in the primary classroom provide many opportunities for children to begin to appreciate such artistic concerns as form, colour and composition alongside a written text. There is more about this under the ‘picture books’ entry.
Books can help children begin to understand about artists from different times and cultures. In the case of younger children, the books are often narratives. The story of Van Gogh’s life as a painter is told in Laurence Anholt’s Camille and the Sunflowers (Frances Lincoln); the book is a starting point for experiments with colour using different media. But it also leads to a search for words to describe the many different yellows and golds the artist used, and it invites the exploration of the characters’ feelings about the paintings. By the later primary years children will begin to understand the social and cultural factors which can affect the work of an artist. The story of Faith Ringgold shows the struggle of a black, woman artist from Harlem to achieve recognition for her work. Her story is told in Faith Ringgold by Robyn Montana Turner (Little, Brown, & Co) and children will appreciate that Faith’s images – which vary from pictures of her slave grandmother to paintings of current figures like Michael Jackson – tell of the artist’s personal history. Many exciting suggestions for children’s own writing – biographical and autobiographical – and for their own art work can be triggered by this book and others are available in the Art and Literacy section of Find That Book (1999).
Poems are often good starting points for children’s pictures and some literature links well with the creation of timelines or friezes with illustrations. I have often seen the journey of Edward Lear’s ‘jumblies’ represented in a lively and humorous frieze (‘The Jumblies’ in A Book of Nonsense, Dragon’s World Publishers). Another favourite poem for inspiring art work is Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin. A student of mine, working with nine year olds, asked them to create their impression of the landscape in the place where the children were taken by the piper. To get them underway, she showed them how different illustrators had imagined the land. Other teachers prefer not to show children other illustrations until after they have completed their paintings. I am still wondering which is the most fruitful way round. Perhaps children need more help than we sometimes appreciate to find ways of building illustrations from a poem or story and to understand that they are not limited to representational works but that an abstract picture might better capture mood and atmosphere.
Carnival is a context in which many media and many ways of celebrating blend – visual (costume making, dance, masks, masquerade), aural – (music) and verbal (poetry, improvisation and story).
Book making also links English and Art in an interesting way: the complementary roles of written text and illustration come into strong relief and children are usually eager that their book should be aesthetically pleasing as well as being a successful story or non-fiction text.
Find That Book: Making links between literacy and the broader curriculum (1999) Lewisham Professional Development Centre. (Tel. 020 8314 6146.)
Flux, Paul (2001) Line and Tone; Colour; Shape; Perspective; Pattern and Texture How Artists Use series. London: Heinemann.
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