Looking to Write: Children Writing Through the Visual Arts » (1st Edition)

Mary Ehrenworth was for many years an Adjunct Professor of Art History before she turned to teaching writing and content-area literacy. As a teacher and staff developer of writing workshop and humanities, she has taught in every grade from two to twelve. She works as a literacy consultant for the New York City public schools.

Breathe new passion into teaching writing. Teach it as an aesthetic experience. Have your students of writing start with art.

Mary Ehrenworth particularly appreciates the meaning and inspiration the visual arts can afford the writing process. An art historian turned literacy consultant, she conducts workshops that use visual prompts as tools to help students locate significant things to write about and craft beautiful writing in response. She also helps teachers discover new possibilities for themselves as curriculum developers and storytellers.

Each of Ehrenworth's chapters describes one way to employ visual art in the writing workshop with reasons to do it, guides for trying it, images, and worksheets. Included throughout the book are breathtaking examples of student writing using artworks as starting points for:

• imagining different perspectives and making them real through story
• practicing empathetic imagination to create narratives and poems of desire and loss
• giving imagination play through contemporary mythmaking
• restructuring identities by communing with a particular work.

Ehrenworth has also collected for use with this book full-color reproductions of artwork, links to museums, handouts, and other resources, all available online at www.heinemann.com/ehrenworth.

Look closely.
In the looking, find things to write about.
And in the writing, experience what Dewey called that "delightful perception."
There's no better way to get there than with Looking to Write.

	List of Illustrations
	Foreword
	A Note About the Companion Website
	Introduction: Ways of Knowing, Ways of Writing	1
Ch. 1	Poetic Understanding: Imagining Picasso	17
Ch. 2	American Landscape and the Aesthetic Experience	43
Ch. 3	Telling Stories of the World: Short Story Writing and Flexible Cultural Perspectives	67
Ch. 4	Mythology and the Pedagogies of Desire	93
	Afterword	127
	Appendices	129
	A Note on More Images	130
	Acknowledgments	169
	Index	171