ArtPlantae Today

Making images as natural as speaking.

– Heinemann Publishing

This is the focus of New Entries: Learning by Writing and Drawing by Ruth Hubbard and Karen Ernst, a collection of case studies about teachers integrating art, science and writing in their classrooms. Thirteen educators contributed to this book and generously share classroom activities and their own learning processes with readers. Here is what you’ll find inside this enlightening resource:

Drawing Rachel In
Susan Benedict, elementary school teacher
Benedict shares how she helped a 4th grade student with her writing and reading through nature journaling.

Widening the Frame: Reading, Writing and Art in Learning
Karen Ernst, teacher and author
Ernst describes how she created her artists workshop, a structured yet flexible workshop in which students actively engage in literature, art and writing.

Writing Pictures, Painting Words: Artists Notebooks in Literacy Workshops
Nancy Winterbourne, elementary school teacher
Winterbourne’s research interests include how drawing in science journals helps students use complex verbs to explain their observations. In this chapter, Winterbourne provides examples of how children’s communication skills are enhanced when they integrate drawing and writing.

Opening Up to Art: Imagery and Story in a High School Reading Class
Peter Thacker, teacher
Thacker shares how he became an artist and learned how to create images with his students.

Beyond Answers
Jill Ostrow, teacher and author
Ostrow writes about how to look at math concepts visually. She shares the problem-solving picture strategies her students created in her class.


Putting Art on the Scientist’s Palette
Mary Stein (scientist) and Brenda Power (writer)
Stein and Power offer practical suggestions about how teachers can integrate art, science and language to move beyond the perceived boundaries between disciplines. 


Imagination Through Images: Visual Responses to Literature
Ruth Shagoury Hubbard
Hubbard discusses how students can use drawing and writing to help them understand what they read.


Reading the Image and Viewing the Words: Languages Intertwined
Irene C. Fountas (Professor, Education)
Janet L. Olson (Professor, Art Education)
Fountas and Olson discuss how reading informs drawing and how viewing images informs writing. 


Parallel Journeys: Exploring Through Art and Writing in Fourth Grade
Peter von Euler, teacher
Peter von Euler explains how the use of “observational journals” helped his students unite writing and art. 


I Look at My Pictures and Then Try It: Art as a Tool for Learning
Jean Anne Clyde (Professor, Literacy)
Clyde shares a story about a student’s use of art as a learning tool and how this student searched for meaning in texts, learned from others and integrated drama, art and math.


Reclaiming the Power of Visual Thinking with Adult Learners
Ruth Shagoury Hubbard
Through her work, Hubbard aims to make “visual language” commonplace among adults. In this chapter, she offers suggestions about how to introduce adults to visual learning.


Background, Foreground: From Experience to Classroom Practice
Karen Ernst
Ernst writes about a summer art workshop for teachers and how this workshop made teachers more sensitive to how their students learn.


Drawing My Selves Together: An Editor’s Notebook
Toby Gordon, education publisher
Editor Toby Gordon describes how editing the book Picturing Learning by Karen Ernst helped move her past negative comments about her work made by her kindergarten teacher.

New Entries: Learning by Writing and Drawing is no longer in print. Search for a used copy at your favorite independent used bookstore.

Literature Cited
Hubbard, Ruth Shagoury and Karen Ernst. 1996. New Entries: Learning by Writing and Drawing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann

Related

• No, Can’t, Don’t
• The Adult Drawing Process