Brown Girl Dreaming Workshop

Tonight I was fortunate enough to attend a workshop on Brown Girl Dreaming, sponsored by Integrating Art, Social Studies, and Language Arts. The workshop consisted of a number of engaging activities.  We began with a theme brainstorm of the book, in which we were asked to turn and talk with a partner and think about the themes we noticed when reading Brown Girl Dreaming. As a group, some of the major themes we noticed were identity, family, friendship, place, education.  Afterwards, four poems from the book were recited, and we were asked to keep them in mind for the rest of the workshop.  There was then a brief lecture on free verse, so we could understand Woodson's writing before we could write our own.  This transitioned us into a free verse activity. My group was assigned the theme of friendship.  We were given different images to trigger our thinking, then we created our own free verse poem in small groups.  To break up the session, we played the game Zip Zap.  I think this was a good way to get us up and moving before we continued. After the game, we did a tableau activity, in which we created a still scene of each other's free verse poems.  Finally, we had time to reflect.  We created a group mural about what the book made us think about and then created a free verse poem about ourselves.

I thought these activities were a really nice way of getting us to think about the book.  I'm definitely going to add some of these techniques, like the tableau, to my strategies tool kit.  I also enjoyed how we had time at the end of the lesson to reflect.  I think this is crucial to every lesson.  All learners need time to process new information and think about the activities they just participated in.  The workshop was a perfect example of a lesson that designs approaches that engage.  There was a nice balance of discussing in partners, small groups, and with the whole class, reflecting individually, writing, drawing, getting up and moving.  I was busy and engaged the whole time, but it never felt overwhelming.

This is the free verse my group wrote based on the images we saw and from what we remembered from the theme of friendship in the novel. 

This is from reflection.  We added images and words to the class mural based on the themes of the book.  The papers next to the mural are our free verses about ourselves.