THE PICASSO HOOK
This hook is all about how to draw your students in by having them create art that reflects their learning. Burgess again has several leading questions in the text to help you figure out how you could implement this hook in a series of lessons. After reading this section, one set of lessons that I thought really tied in with this was my third grade unit on Geometry in Art using the works of Kandinsky. I was looking for a way to make teaching geometry really come alive for my students. After a series of lessons using my basal text and a web quest that I’d created on the artist, I partnered with the art teacher and the technology teacher to have students create work to reflect their learning in geometry. After the unit was done, we went to the local art gallery. I created a scavenger’s hunt for the students to complete with the chaperones while they were there. The students were required to find specific ‘Geometry in Art’. There was a student copy with clues to find artwork with geometric shapes, and a parent copy with pictures of the art to help parents know just what to look for–on the off chance that the parents didn’t know which pieces of art I was referring to.
THE MOZART HOOK
This hook is all about how to use music in the most effective way to grab your students’ attention and keep it with music! Burgess shares several really neat ideas here. You could play music for them, that highlights the lesson, or you could ask them to bring you music that reminds them of what you’re teaching. You could use music in transitions, or even offer creating their own music as a way to show what they know. You could even change popular music lyrics to reflect content you’re teaching in class. I’ve already mentioned how I used this with the Gangnam Style song in an earlier post. Another time I used music was at the culmination of a unit on the Underground Railroad. The students created history quilts and researched the time period. We learned many songs from the period and wrote a play, complete with a powerpoint slide show of images we found on the internet to support what we were learning! Everyone loved our songs & poems! ๐
THE DANCE & DRAMA HOOK
This hook is all about how the students can re-enact famous events or write plays, or even do skits for a video. I would say that I’m not much of a DANCER, but, I do like to video tape my kids talking about things that they learned. I had several posts at the end of the year that showed them discussing how to use strategies in math. I’ll have to get better with the dance part of this hook! ๐
THE CRAFT STORE HOOK
Now that I am back in first grade, craft store products abound–but when I was in third, it was a lot harder for me to wrap my mind around ‘being crafty’. Not so much because I don’t LIKE crafts, per se, but because these types of things TAKE TIME, and if I am not CERTAIN that they will generate results, then…it becomes a time waster. To combat that, I’d make sure that whenever I had a ‘crafty’ idea, I planned with the end in mind. When I taught third, I made solar ovens with the kids. I brought in cheerios boxes from home–the hubs eat a LOT of cheerios–some aluminum foil, black construction paper, tape, plastic wrap, yarn and paint sticks. I told the kids to use what they knew about solar ovens and conducting thermal energy to make me a solar oven that would get hot enough to bake the cookie dough we made in class that morning!
Hope you enjoyed reading about today’s hooks! ๐
