3 Visual Thinking Exercises To Try in English Class
Activities like mapping, sketching, and sculpting can help students clarify ideas—and deepen their literary analysis skills.
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Go to My Saved Content.In English language arts, students often grapple with complex ideas that can be challenging to make sense of with words alone. Renowned authors like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis relied on visual representations of their stories to build their fictional landscapes. Translating complex ideas, relationships, or plotlines into something tangible by doing visual thinking activities in English class gives them a new angle, helping students better grasp the story’s motifs and messages.
Thematic sculptures can help clue students into a text’s major themes. By using familiar tools such as Lego bricks or Play-Doh, students ease into the exercise and allow themselves the creative freedom to express their ideas in a playful new way. In a gallery walk, students get to witness their peers’ thinking processes and expand their own thoughts on what the main ideas could be.
A read-aloud quick sketch directs a student’s full attention to a novel or literary text. As the teacher reads a story, students listen for patterns, quotes, and important events to jot down or interpret through a drawing. This allows them to connect more deeply with a text as they determine what to draw or note. Their sketches anchor their thoughts and make it easier to recall important details later.
Mapping a fictional landscape before embarking on a creative writing project can help students build their own plotlines, settings, and mental models of spaces. They can use maps to double-check their descriptions by looking for inconsistencies between their written details and their physical blueprints.
In literature, underlying messages and themes often lack explicit explanation. For some students, only reading letters on paper (or on a screen) makes grasping these complex ideas more challenging. But physically seeing patterns, relationships, and ideas can help many students draw more connections to the text as they make their own associations.
For more ideas on how to encourage students to picture their literary thoughts in English class, read Andrea Tamayo’s article for Edutopia, “6 Cool Visual Thinking Activities That Strengthen Student Writing.”
To learn more about the research cited in the video, check out Keith W. Thiede et al.’s work on how drawing can improve comprehension.