About Drawing and Writing Courses

These intensive courses address the challenge of teaching core skills so that students learn to think well over a lifetime. The course also encourages teachers' thinking skills which arechallenged in the classroom and evaluated in qualifying state-mandated tests.

This easy-to-deliver drawing-based writing program introduces and consolidates a range of visual and verbal strategies, including direct investigation and description, multiple lines of inquiry, the design and investigation of complex problems, and the testing and analysis of alternative hypotheses - or the scientific method. Because parents and teachers and other
caregivers repeat each exercise, they improve their own abilities to draw, write, and think. Drawing/Writing provides portfolio assessment, peer mentoring, integrated art education (and this a range of ESL and special needs strategies), and a routine approach to building vocabulary skills, along with speaking skills, reading skills and writing skills, including grammar. A self-assessment tool is built into the program.

Drawing/Writing is delivered in one- to two-week sessions at the rate of one to two hours per day. Ideally, it is used to start the school year, setting the tone of the classroom as a learning community, at the middle, and at the end of the school year. In this manner, the program provides three sets of bench marks for visual and verbal literacy as well as for thinking skills during each academic year. The bench-marks are student-determined. Students use the self-assessment tool. They decide how they are growing as literate minds.

The fifth Drawing/Writing step, the Composite Abstraction, introduces the possibility of discussing ethical behavior, using aesthetics as its basis. Abstract drawing also opens students' minds of the idea of multiple representations. The more ways a student has to represent and communicate information, the more effective that student's mind will be.

Teachers and parents can teach directly from this book by reading Part Two aloud. There is no need for practice or rehearsal. The teacher or parent simply reads aloud.

Testimony about D/W Courses

Hi Susan,
    Having had a day to reflect, I am so pleased with the experience I had in your basic level course. I am looking forward to continue developing my writing and drawing skills in your classrooms.

    I noticed an immediate narrowing of focus in my writing attempts, and will continue working on that through the act of practice. Our spirits feel like kin. I'm talking to people I know about the four days in February, because I'd love to have another cohesive group.

    One benefit of teaching your courses over a long period of time rather than intensively is that participants would have more opportunity to develop a routine of drawing/writing in their lives. That is what I am striving for and I think that at least doing these three weeks with you will be boosts of inspiration and guidance, like connecting the dots. In the meantime, I'll do my best to stay focused.

    Treat yourself to some favorite pass-time, because you succeeded in what you set out to teach us: to make connections between two different ways of thinking; to consider other approaches (vocabulary discussions, editing activities, peer work)and help us to tangentially develop some skills. I definately saw an improvement in my drawings, and felt challenged to tighten up my writing, AND found an outlet for creative impulses.

Thank you again.
Be well.
tbh, January 2001

M. gave me a travel journal to take along on this trip, and without realizing it, I began drawing in it as well: some iconic stuff, some detailed stuff, sketches from museums. All of it spontaneous, clumsy, and rewarding. It's mixed in with the journal entries, at times supplementary, though most of the time wholly unrelated (which can be abstractly complementary, as you know). I hadn't drawn in ages, since high school, and it's a remarkable sensation when the eye becomes such a vibrant, active organ.

PG- novelist, editor, New York City, January 2002

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