Joyfully Addressing Misconceptions Through Visual Art

Capdau, 5th Grade
ELA & Visual Art
Ms. Chiarizio & Ms. Fulton

As a former classroom teacher, I know that catching student misunderstandings can be tricky. Students may be able to repeat back key vocabulary and demonstrate some level of understanding concepts but still, struggle when it comes time to apply the skills and content that both they and I thought they had mastered.

“This is the practicality and magic of arts integration: it both makes visible student misconceptions and uses a visual modality to teach the content in a new way, all while having fun!”

Ms. Fulton’s ELA class was reviewing figurative language, a concept they had prior exposure to but some students had not yet fully grasped. We planned a lesson in which students would use illustrations to draw the difference between literal and figurative language. Small groups were assigned a simile, metaphor, or idiom. They first drew the phrase's literal meaning, such as a person holding a horse above their head for “Hold your horses,” and then the figurative meaning, a teacher telling a classroom of rowdy students to be patient. Using visual art in this way allowed students to see and understand the different meanings of the phrases and alerted us to student misunderstandings. When a student struggled to understand the difference between the literal and figurative meanings, their drawings demonstrated their confusion, and we were able to explain the figurative language until they understood the multiple meanings of the phrases. These students were also able to see their classmates' examples and then create new drawings that reflected their new understanding of figurative language. The class period was full of laughter as groups worked on their drawings, shared their work, and developed a deeper understanding of figurative language through visual art.