Draw Me Something Beautiful

In every class I have ever taught, I have always had students who finished assessments in a fraction of the time that some of their peers need. Before I instituted my game-changing cell phone protocol, students would retreat into their devices as their classmates finished up.

Even though I have been instituting my cell phone policy for almost two years now, I still had to figure out how to give my early finishers something meaningful to do.

I thought, why not use this time to deliver more input? While I have always encouraged my students to grab a book from our class library and read casually when they’re done their assessment, the reality is that some students need this time to decompress and allow their brains to return from assessment mode.

I suspect that graphic novels, such as Señor Wooly’s “La casa de la dentista” would result in more students actually reading, as they are lighter than chapter books yet still deliver high-quality, compelling input. We plan to order several graphic novels and comics for next school year. However, this still left me with the dilemma of what to do with the kids who I knew weren’t going to choose to read.

I recently started adding drawing prompts to the back of my assessments. At the top of the paper, I write “¿Ya estás terminado? Dibúja me algo bonito.,” which for non-Spanish speakers, means “Are you already done? Draw me something beautiful.” I then give two or three scenes that they can draw. Of course, these are optional and not graded. As I looked around the room during our first assessment this semester, I noticed that almost everyone who didn’t elect to read was drawing and seemed to be enjoying it.

Just like a well-designed assessment can recycle previously used vocabulary and grammatical structures, a compelling drawing prompt is just another way to deliver more comprehensible input. I included animals in both prompts for this first assessment because students love to draw them and compare their work with their classmates. Some even added speech bubbles and had their characters speaking in Spanish. How’s that for unforced production?

Here is some artwork from this past week: