How Do I Love Thee: Modeling & Dimensional Thinking

I had some difficulty determining which route I wanted to take for this activity. Since my content area is language arts, I first had to brainstorm what types of models are already in place within this area of focus. For me, teaching language arts is all about modeling the specific skills for students to master. I do this in several ways. For example, through the use of graphic organizers students are able to break down the texts in portions that are more manageable and easier to comprehend. For the purpose of this particular activity I wanted to devise a way for students to model one area of figurative language with hopes that the model could aid in their understanding of the selected topic. It is for this reason that I decided to focus on similes.

 According to Dictionary.com, a simile is "a figure of speech in which two unlike things are explicitly compared". For example, "The girl is as busy as a bee". I began to think of how my students could  physically create models within this type of figurative language. I realized that by creating graphic representations of similes, students could experience the topic on a whole new level. Furthermore, I could easily use this activity as a model to teach the importance of similes in general. The benefits of this type of model include providing struggling students with a concrete representation, while allowing my students to be as creative as they pleased. 

To me as a teacher, modeling is creating a smaller more manageable representation of something that is normally on a much larger scale. Models can be abstract in nature, or very concrete. The dimension that I chose to explore similes through is a series of images in which my students would select and choose. I will now provide some insight as to what exactly it was that I had my students do. Students were provided with a selection of several different magazines filled with images. They were then instructed to create similes based on a topic of their choice. They were allowed to chose images from the magazines to serve as models for those similes that were created. Select samples of the graphical representations of the similes created can be found below. 

 

 

 

 

 

I chose an activity of this nature in order to ignite the imaginations of my students. Students are very accustomed to writing without creating anything visual to accompany their work. I try to integrate art whenever possible, but at times this is a near impossible task. Another positive for this activity was allowing students to cross a language barrier. Since many of my students speak English as a second language, this really helped to create meaning through the use of pictures. It allowed students to truly own their similes they had composed in class. As Sparks of Genius points out, Picasso said "To model is to possess it" (pg. 230). This activity allowed my students to take ownership of their written work while creating a whole new dimension of understanding.