Somos Ilustradores

ISL DIXON, 2nd Grade | Social Studies & Visual Art
Mr. Malbrough

This year in my two 2nd grade Spanish classes I wanted to give the students a taste of what it is like to be a published artist. The way we accomplished this was by having them create their own textbooks! First I showed them the textbook that I illustrated years ago to give them an idea of what textbooks even look like (after realizing that they don't have them in the 2nd grade), including things like table of contents and a buzz word glossary (which had most of the art terms that they learned). I then explained their cover concept, they would be adding to their cover throughout the year with symbols that stood for the different activities that we did in the books. For the rest of the semester we did all of our activities in the books. We linked elements of science and social studies like changes in matter, biographies, and land masses with illustrative elements like sequential storytelling, portraits, and negative space. The teachers were given free reign to add supplemental pages (usually in the form of explanatory paragraphs or fun blurbs from the students) to the books to further incorporate what the students did when I wasn't in the class into their textbooks. 

This project has been incredibly fulfilling as the students were able to get into a rhythm of what we were doing inside of the structure of creating the book (titles of the pages, adding to the table of contents and glossary,) while also feeling like they were active participants in how they displayed what they learned (the actual art assignments and things like picking symbols for the covers).