Pictures provide an invaluable stimulus for children to develop their literacy skills, says Ghislane Kenyon
?It?s hardest for the boys?, says Mark Hazzard, deputy headteacher at Windmill Hill primary school, ?Even the enthusiastic writers feel defeated by uninspiring writing assignments and give up before they?ve even started.? Mark has taught for 18 years and has never stopped looking for ways of making learning an enjoyable (and therefore successful) process for all his Year 6 students. This has sometimes meant making creative detours around the constraints of curriculum and assessment. A turning point for him came when he attended a teachers? course at the National Gallery, where I was Schools Officer. In one session we looked at the extraordinary fourteenth-century painting known as the ?Wilton Diptych?, and considered it from the point of view of a curator, a conservator and an education officer, to demonstrate how much learning there was to be had from a single piece of art. Mark returned to school convinced that he could transfer this knowledge to the classroom. He planned a bold project: every afternoon of the following term the class would work with a print of the ?Diptych? in different curriculum areas including art and design and history, which also included writing. He noticed how motivated the children were when an image rather than a text was the starting point for writing: ?An image is available to a whole class regardless of ability ? children think very visually and so feel more ready to decode a picture than a text. They are very liberated when it comes to writing with a picture as the stimulus.?
Several years later, we worked together on a literacy project at the Courtauld Gallery. Mark?s class made three visits to the Gallery, during which they got to know 12 artworks, ranging from a fourteenth century triptych, through paintings by Rubens, Manet and Kandinsky, and ending with a Barbara Hepworth sculpture. The aim was for children to use the works to prompt writing in different modes: narratives, poetry and factual writing. Mark feels that the gallery visit, with the unrushed discussion in front of original works, is a key to success: ?It?s here that the really good speaking and listening work gets done, on which literacy skills depend. Through concentrated looking children find ways of articulating what they can see, learning new vocabulary (perspective, foreground, composition) and perhaps most importantly, entering the imagination of the artists through their works.? The children took postcards of the works back to school and stuck them onto individual A4 sheets. They made notes around each image, and often these would be information-based; for example of Rubens? ?The Family of Jan Bruegel the Elder?, one child said, ?They?re all looking at us except the little girl. The boy and girl are fiddling with their mother?s rings and bracelets.? These observations then led the child to the mature conclusion that the portrait seemed a very ?natural one? because the children were behaving as real children might when sitting for a portrait: nervous, restless and looking to the adults for reassurance. With Pieter Bruegel?s ?Landscape with the Flight into Egypt?, the brief was to produce a piece of imaginative writing based on what Joseph might be thinking. Luke, aged 10, wrote: ?I feel weak and tired and I think that this journey is never going to end. We have crossed rapid rivers to climb the tallest of hills and the rockiest of mountain. We have passed hazardous objects but still there is no sign of Egypt.? Of course the children could have used an existing narrative text about the Flight into Egypt as a framework, but Mark observed how much more willing they were to write, and write interestingly, when the picture did so much of the work for them. In Luke?s words: ?The closer you look, the more there is to write about, and it makes you think about how people in the pictures might be feeling.? ?And?, added Mark, ?the other bonus is that the class now all believe that an art gallery is a place for them.?
Ghislaine Kenyon is Head of Learning in the Joint Education Department at Somerset House. For information about education programmes t: 020 7420 9406; w: http://www.somerst-house.org.uk or http://www.courtauld.ac.uk