Overview: No artistic abilities are required for this quick activity regardless of whether it is a stand-alone activity or unit starter. Context and communication styles will definitely be part of the wrap-up discussion and students will want to practice their ability to provide detail and listen critically well after this activity ends.
To access the video recording of the webinar detailing this lesson, please click here.
Materials Needed:
- Students will need a piece of paper and a writing utensil. [Colored pencils will add complexity to the activity.] This page gives you some ideas of potential images you can describe if you do this as a stand-alone activity.
- If doing this activity virtually, teachers will need a platform for students to record themselves via audio or video and a mechanism for students to post these recordings. [Flipgrid will allow for both.]
- Teachers will need the discussion questions and the follow-up notes. [Provided below]
Learning Outcomes:
- Students will identify challenges and solutions when communicating about and describing visual imagery.
- Students will improve their ability to be thoughtful active listeners and effective communicators
Learning Objectives:
By the end of the activity, students will be able to…
- Describe the importance of clear communication in a variety of circumstances.
- Recognize that there are various communication styles and that an individual’s background may impact how they communicate.
Directions:
- The goal of the activity is for students to understand what can happen when speakers and listeners are unable to communicate effectively.
- Have students draw or create an image. Images can be an original idea and/or related to the content area.
- Have students act as the ‘speaker’ and record themselves describing the image via your preferred educational tech platform/tool. [Consider a platform like Flipgrid so classmates can watch, comment & display their iteration of the image after listening. Students can also use a voice memo on their phones and upload the file to a platform like Padlet.]
- Note: Remind students that they should NOT show their image or drawing nor give any visual cues. The purpose of the activity is for students to act as ‘Listeners’ to another ‘Speaker”, practice their listening and critical thinking skills, and try to recreate the drawing/image based on the ‘Speakers’ description.
- Post the pre-recorded descriptions on your preferred educational tech platform/tool. [See tech ideas in #3 above.]
- Assign students the role of ‘Listener’ and pair them up with another classmates’ recording.
- Inform students that the goal is for each ‘Listener’ to reproduce the image as described by the ‘Speaker’.
- Have ‘Listeners’ post the image their work on the assigned online learning platform.
- Once all ‘Listeners’ have shared and compared their work, then have ‘Speakers’ share the images they described.
- Lead students in the discussion.
- Debrief the activity with the Discussion and Follow-up.
Discussion:
- As the Speaker, how did it feel to describe the image without being able to share the image/give visual clues?
- As the Listener, what strategies did you use to do the task?
- As the Listener, how did it feel to do the task without any visual clues, getting any feedback nor being able to ask clarifying questions?
- How does your image compare to the image the Speaker described?
- How does the Speaker’s image compare to their description of it?
- What similarities or differences did you notice about other Listeners’ images?
- If you were to do this task again, what might you do differently?
- How did one-sided communication [i.e. ‘Listeners’ were unable to ask questions and get feedback] impact your ability to succeed with this task?
- What additional strategies could Speakers use to help Listeners better understand descriptions and meaning?
- What communication strategies do you use in your school and daily life to help others to understand what you mean?
Discussion Follow-up:
- Our communication style can impact how we communicate with others.
- Our communication style is often influenced by our family, environment, culture, and personality.
- Regardless of one’s communication style, communicating effectively requires the use of descriptive language, active listening skills and follow-up for clarification and understanding.
- When describing images, many speakers tend to focus more attention on what they want to say, rather than on what listeners want, need to or are able to hear.
- Many speakers assume that if they do an expressive job of describing their mental image, then the listeners will be able to ‘see’ the same image.
- To do this activity well, there must be a shared and clear comprehension and vision of the goal or final product/result.
- As speakers, in order for listeners to understand your message, it is important to use clear, effective language.
- This includes using specific descriptions, checking in for comprehension, and if possible, even giving a visual clue.
Extension in Content Area:
Art – Use this activity as described in the instructions before a student shares a piece of artwork that they’ve recently created. A follow-up to this can be a peer review of the actual artwork after recognizing the complexity in the original project by the student that was speaking.
English Language Arts – This activity can be a chance to add some great discussion after students complete a reading [fiction or non-fiction] where they’ve been asked to visually represent what they learned or what happened in the reading. The renditions of this will have two layers of complexity: Their perceptions of the reading and what their personal biases and understanding is of what they read AND the interpretation of what their partner conveyed with their oral description of the drawing.
Family & Consumer Sciences – Consider completing the activity using an image that is appropriate to the subject area. A food dish for a culinary course, a fabric/clothing design for a textiles course or even an image of “family” in a child development course.
Math – Consider having students do this activity with only mathematical terms and shapes. For example, they must use the official math terminology and angles to reference the parts of their drawing to the other person.
Science – Consider completing the activity with an image of a science-related themes. The discussion and follow-up can be the same, but the theme will be on point with whatever lesson you are doing in class.
Social Studies – Consider completing this activity using a moment in history. This can be used as a great lead-in to a review of various time periods of history as each student will need to “guess” the historical event taking place after reviewing their new drawing.
World Language – Complete the activity in the target language. This activity can reinforce a student’s ability to use circumlocution and will allow both students to practice the oral and aural aspects to language learning. Consider using before and after pictures from the show called “Nailed It” on Netflix as a lead-in or wrap-up to the activity for fun. [“Nailed It” is recorded in English, but does have some episodes in Spanish that were recorded in Mexico.] Consider having students repeat this activity a second time to encourage them altering their behaviors/communication to see how they learn and improve after the first attempt. [Best for Novice – Intermediate Low]
For more lesson plan ideas, please visit the AFS-USA Teacher’s Toolbox.
For questions, comments or suggestions, please email us at [email protected].
Download Lesson Plan
This activity is a great to tool to practice oral and written communication skills as well as reinforce math vocabulary, estimation, and measurement skills. Originally, I created this resource as a way to help students be more thorough and clear in their process writing. I was specifically interested in helping them recount their process for building STEM challenge designs and learning to write effective procedures for science labs and experiments. While I always loved the make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich activity, sometimes you don’t want to get into the mess [and allergies]! I’ve got a freebie for you to try at the end!
I created a set of task cards that require students to describe relative size and position of various shapes, lines, and angles [triangle [right, acute, obtuse, scalene, equilateral, isosceles], square, rectangle, parallelogram, hexagon, pentagon, octagon, circle, oval, parallel lines, intersecting lines, perpendicular lines, etc.] Though students don’t strictly need to use this vocabulary to succeed, it certainly helps!
The cards work for a wide range of ages and they’re a lot of fun. I created a few videos to walk you through several ways to use the cards, as well as some examples of my family going through several of the cards below. I’ve listed their ages and you’ll see their final drawings compared to the original at the end of each clip. I’ve included additional ideas and tips in the resources, including the freebie you’ll find linked at the end.
Watch the Overview
Introducing the Activity to Your Class
Timing
Measurement / Estimation Expectations
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Example 4
Resources & Freebie
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Transcription of Overview Video
Hi, I’m Kerry from Feel Good Teaching and today we’re going to do something just a little bit different. If you’re familiar with my STEM challenges, you know that I always offer process flow templates as an extension activity. Now this is where the students are supposed to basically write step by step how to rebuild whatever they’re design is.
We all know that clear and precise communication is so important for all kinds of writing and in science, this comes in particularly handy when students have to write out procedures for a lab or science experiment, so I like my students to get a lot of practice with this type of writing, and boy do they need that practice.
If you’ve been a teacher for awhile, you’re probably familiar with the step by step how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich activity, but I was looking for something that could be done a little bit more quickly, a little bit more consistently, and a whole lot less sticky. With that in mind, I created some task cards to practice this essential skill. You can use them with a variety of age groups.
I call them Speak, Listen, Draw cards and they’re fantastic because they can be used to practice academic vocabulary, things like measuring, estimation, geometry, speaking and listening comprehension, as well as reading and writing. On top of that, they’re actually pretty fun. Last year, I brought them home for Thanksgiving and people in my family from ages four to 34 wanted to get in on the fun and improve their skills and I’ll be showing you a few clips throughout this video of them working on these cards. Why don’t we quickly try one out for fun? Pause the video, go grab yourself a piece of scratch paper and a pencil and we’ll get started.
In the center of the page, draw a square tilted on it’s side so that one vertex is pointed up and slightly to the right, sort of like a diamond. Coming off of the bottom vertex of the square, draw a small, equilateral triangle, about one quarter the size of the square. Connect it to the vertex pointed to the right, draw a circle about the same size as the square, maybe a tiny bit smaller. Coming off the vertex pointed left, draw another equilateral triangle, but this one is about the same size as the square and circle.
Ready to see how you did? Were my directions perfect? Probably not. Did you find yourself wanting to ask clarifying questions? I would guess yes. I’m going to walk you through a few different ways to use this activity, including ways to up the difficulty if you want to give your students an extra challenge.
You’ll want to partner students up. One student is the director and gets a card that has a drawing on it. The other student is the illustrator and they just get a blank sheet of paper. I usually have the students put up file folder dividers because I don’t want the director or the illustrator to see what the other one has on their paper until the very end. And the director is only allowed to use words, no talking with their hands or motioning in order to give the directions.
One thing to consider is whether or not you want to allow the illustrator to ask clarifying questions of the director. Now, at the beginning when students are first using these activities, I always allow clarifying questions. But one way to increase difficulty over time is to start to take that opportunity away, meaning the illustrator is not allowed to speak at all, they must simply do their best job based on the directions that they’re hearing from the director.
Bethany: Divide that rectangle into four pieces-
Michael: Like a line across and a line down the middle?
Bethany: -so that it’s a cross, that it’s like a T.
Another interesting way to do this is in groups where there’s one director, and three illustrators. Now in this case we want dividers so that nobody can see what is going on in anybody else’s cards. What I like about this approach is it makes it sort of clear, for both the director and the illustrator, how they’re doing with their speaking or listening skills. Because if, for example, all three illustrators have the same mistake from the original card, well, that’s probably something that the director needs to clarify.
On the flip side, if one illustrator has something sort of strange on his or her card, but the other two didn’t, well, then maybe that’s an indication that the illustrator either wasn’t listening very carefully, or maybe there was some academic vocabulary used that he or she was not familiar with.
Another variation I really enjoy is something I call Around the World. Now, in this one, every student in the class has a director card and they’ll probably have, let’s say, three or four illustrator cards, because this is going to be done in several rounds. So as student one, I give my directions to student two. They draw. Student two gives their directions to me. I draw. We can give each other feedback, but then right after that we’re going to switch and get a new partner. But we’re going to keep our same cards.
You’ll repeat that, say, three or four rounds, so the director is getting an opportunity three or four times in a row to refine the directions on a single card. At the end, you can have them report on how they hopefully did refine and change the directions over time to make things more clear.
Another way you can do Around the World is to have the students actually trade their director cards before they move to round two. So that would mean whatever I illustrated in round one, I’m now taking as the director card to round two. Now I’m going in with the experience of what it was like to listen to the directions and what might have been unclear to me, so that I can improve upon that for round two.
You can probably already see a lot of different ways to use this in your own classroom, but I find that they’re really great for early finishers, include them in your sub-plans and just have them handy for when you’ve got five minutes left in class. You can use this as a homework assignment, where the students are giving directions to a parent or a sibling.
You can put this into reading and writing centers, you can do a tongue-tied version, similar to Taboo, where there’s a list of words the students are not allowed to use.
You can challenge students to give the directions in the fewest number of sentences possible, which is great if you’re working on compound and complex sentences, or you can even go for the fewest total number of words. And you can use pretty much any kind of drawings for these, but if you want to save some precious time, check out the resource. This resource gives your students consistent, quick practice with speaking and listening, estimation and measurement, geometry and even reading and writing, depending on how you use them.
You’ll get an introduction overview with logistics and set up considerations. In Teacher Tips, you’ll find different ways to use the cards, ideas for increased challenge, a sample script for introducing the activity, and discussion points. You’ll get 44 director’s cards, four per page. You’ll also find illustrator’s cards and pages you can use in reading and writing centers. This resource is set number one in the Speak, Listen, Draw series. You may also like the Halloween set and the Halloween freebie to try before you buy. Links can be found in the description below the video.
I hope you and your students have a great time with this. Make sure you like, subscribe, follow, what have you, so you don’t miss anything. I hope you have a great week packed with feel good teaching moments. I’ll see you next time.