Tag Archives: creativity

Annotating To Kill a Mockingbird

Posted on May 26, 2016 by jyourist

My student’s amazing graphic annotation of To Kill a Mockingbird.

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Wintergatan- Marble Machine

Posted on March 6, 2016 by jyourist

The musical band/group Wintergatan (Swedish for “Milky Way”) is a creative group of musicians who utilize unexpected objects and mechanical devices to create their sound. They call their style of music — folktronica. This Marble Machine was created and built … Continue reading →

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Patterned tapes

Posted on February 25, 2016 by jyourist

This photo is of a personalized computer one of my students brought to school today to complete work on a research paper. She used a variety of patterned tapes to create this visual menagerie. At first I thought she had … Continue reading →

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Memory Lane

Posted on December 28, 2015 by jyourist

Each time I get in to Ann Arbor to visit my mother, I try to do some sort of activity with her and some of the ladies in her wing. In November we made cards using stamps and last week … Continue reading →

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Transforming Brown v Board of Education

Posted on October 29, 2015 by jyourist

Sometimes after we read a text I will have the students use a process of found poetry as a closure. I xerox some random and not so random spreads of the book and the students select words on the pages … Continue reading →

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Getting Comfortable with ambiguity

Posted on September 9, 2015 by jyourist

Emily Dickinson today! —I dwell in Possibility— A difficult poem but after I dictated the poem to the class and they carefully wrote it in their journals, I then assigned each student a word to look up and define (like … Continue reading →

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And more All Quiet creative projects

Posted on May 4, 2015 by jyourist

At the end of our reading of All Quiet on the Western Front, I ask my 8th graders to produce a creative response to the book. This can take any form: a play, a poem, an image, a piece of music. Today … Continue reading →

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Greetings from Niagara Falls

Posted on November 28, 2014 by jyourist

My mother has a friend in her assisted living facility. In fact, we have been hearing quite a bit about him over the last year. After exercise class, he always volunteers to wheel her from the class back to her … Continue reading →

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Abelardo Morell

Posted on June 14, 2014 by jyourist

Last summer JB and I saw an incredible exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. It was the very first retrospective of the photographer Abellardo Morell. He has experimented with the camera obscura, among other things, where he has darkened … Continue reading →

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The Roving Typist

Posted on February 19, 2014 by jyourist

Needing money, Christopher Hermelin took his Royal Typewriter to the park and wrote stories for anyone for a few dollars. Now it is an art project, a kind of performance piece. He keeps no record of the stories. Once he … Continue reading →

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