Spotlight on Strategies – Instagram
As a language arts teacher I am always looking for new ways to engage my students in responding to literature and nonfiction writing. By sixth grade the kids have been told how to answer a question using one formula or another and they’re pretty good at it. Teaching a formula for responding is a great way to ensure that students have sufficiently answered the question and know how to use textual evidence. But it can also lead to robotic type answers that students find boring to answer and teachers find torturous to grade! In addition to further engaging students, I also want students to look at responses, literally, through a different lense.
The Spotlight on Strategies assignment gave me an opportunity to explore the use of Instagram for literature responses that pair the nonlinguistic (visual) with the linguistic to maximize all student achievement. I found a great number of resources that discussed using Instagram for assignments and found one that was easy to modify for the use I intended. Students will select a character from a novel and post as if they were them.
I added a few components to the assignment to ensure that students were working towards meeting standards and not just engaging in a fun activity. Once kids created their post they would need to justify the selection of the icon for the character, the user name, the picture selected, the caption, and the hashtags. By doing this students really have to put thought behind the selection of each item.
By completing one Instagram posting for each chapter students will have created a series of postings. One of their final assignments will be to look for a pattern within these postings. Have they seen the character grow or change? Do they see a theme being illustrated? I believe this will give students an understanding as to why they are asked to respond to literature as they read and enhance their overall understanding and enjoyment of the novel.