MEETING INDIVIDUAL NEEDS
Letter Books

essential when figuring out how to address this problem.

Making art concepts stick with students is hard enough without throw- ing language problems into the mix. ELL (English Language Learner) students often have a hard time understanding the concepts so many art educators stress in their lessons. I teach kindergarten to fifth-grade art and more than 90% of my students are classified as ELL. Not only is it difficult to cover concepts, it is a challenge to bridge the gap and reach all of my students without the use of layered strategies in every lesson I teach.

In my quest to reach all my students, I have found it extremely helpful to incorporate other academic areas into my lesson planning. Reaching out to my peers was

Kathryn Granchelli

The First Day
of School

When my kindergarten students walked through my doors on the first day of school, I could see the fear in their eyes when I said “Good morning, students.” Panic swept through me as I realized that they had no idea what I was saying. How was I going to get through this forty minutes every day?

It became clear that
to address higher-level
thinking or even a basic
level of speaking, I
would have to use lan-
guage side-by-side with
art. Studies have shown
that reading to children
increases vocabulary as
well as reading skills.
Why not incorporate
this into art? With the help of col-
leagues, I developed Letter Books, an
ongoing project that I now use with
my kindergartners to emphasize the
importance of the arts while helping
them acquire the English language
skills they need to be successful in
school.

ter, and having students use the letter in an alphabet book.

First, we identified the letter to be covered that week. For example, when we covered A, I wrote a capital “A” and a lower case “a” on the board and we brainstormed different words that start with A. We also used hand gestures and the volume of our voices to differentiate the capital and lower case letters. Then we read and discussed Two Bad Ants by Chris Van Allsburg.

Next, students each created two pages for their letter books. I gave them two sheets of paper that showed the letter A. They could color the first sheet however they liked. On the second sheet they could practice writing the letter and drawing pictures of objects whose names began with it.

Finally, students completed an art project that incorporated the letter. For example, for the letter A, using the book Two Bad Ants, students constructed movable giant ants.

We followed this basic process for every letter in the alphabet. I kept the pages all year, and at the end of the year, students put all their pages together and made covers for them.

I have found that because I am covering the same letter as the classroom teachers, but choosing different literature, students are learning different contexts for the vocabulary. I have also witnessed a new level of confidence in my students and in my teaching, knowing I am enriching their lives on many different levels through art.

Reinforcing the Alphabet

Our kindergarten uses a curriculum
calendar to map out
what teachers are
covering each week.
Classroom teachers
focus on one letter
of the alphabet for
a week, covering A
to Z over the course
of the year. Each
week when my students came to me, I
reinforced the letter they were already
learning about by reading them a chil-
dren’s book that incorporated that let-