Want to know why it’s fun to get students to do drawing for writing and speaking purposes? I’ll tell you! Because drawing is fun. Students will enjoy it if you ask them to do a drawing of something. It helps them use their imagination while also asking them to move, which is always a good thing! Combining that with language learning is a great tool to help your students improve their language skills.
There were plenty of moments in my teaching career when I felt like I kept students on tasks that were boring, and while useful, maybe not as effective. I longed for students to just get creative. That’s when I discovered a box of crayons in my room that wasn’t even mine, but I thought how can I use this to my advantage? The answer was let’s have students do a drawing of something. The actual language task came after, but the seed was already there in my head. So let me tell you when I get students to do drawings!
Wanna skip ahead? Click here to grab my free Drawing and Writing Ideas PDF, which you can download by clicking here! Or you can keep reading and download it after 🙂
Draw write now!
I have some drawing and writing ideas I have done with my students over the years, so see if they can help you in your lessons!
- Get students to draw a scene from their favorite movie. Then have them explain at the bottom why that is their favorite scene in a couple of sentences.
- Have students choose a scene from a novel they’re reading that shows a certain theme. Get them to choose a quote from the novel to match that scene. You could do the same for setting, characters, and the other literary elements, of course.
- Get students to do a drawing in response to a video. What was the most important part of the video, and have them explain by writing it down in a couple of sentences, or talk about it in small groups.
- Have students draw in response to a written text. What was the most important part of the text, and have them explain by writing it down in a couple of sentences, or talk about it in small groups.
- See if students can do a drawing which features a grammar point. For example, have them draw something that happened in the past and then get them to use the Past Simple to explain their drawing in written or spoken form. Or get them to draw a room full of things which they must explain by using the prepositions. You can choose virtually any grammar point you want them to show in their writing or speaking.
- Ask students to describe something to a partner in the target language, and their partner must draw what they described. Or you can do this yourself, if you want to make sure that the language input is entirely correct.
So these are the types of exercises I like to do with students!
Drawing and writing journal
You can have students keep a drawing and writing notebook to do these types of tasks in. It would be a portfolio of sorts, and it’d be fun to watch their progress. If you’d like a drawing and writing template to use for this purpose, then click here to grab the one I made that you can use with any specific task you would give students for a drawing activity.
Have fun with this! I know your students will!
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