The Sun Sunnyvale's Newspaper Photograph by Skye Dunlap At the end of the Image-Making program, these students will use their paintings as inspiration to write their own books. Spinning Yarns Image-Making teaches kids the art of storytelling By Michelle Ku Chelsea Hagerty's face lit up when she blended the two colors of the acrylic paint in the marbleizing liquid. Using a wooden stick, she made different shaped designs and then transferred her pattern onto a piece of paper. While she didn't completely realize why she was creating the artwork, Chelsea, 7, was having fun. "I like this because you can do different things. You can make different shapes and drawings," she said. "When I'm done here, I'm supposed to hang my paper over there to dry. I think we're going to do something with them in a few days." What Chelsea didn't know was that at the end of the academic year, that marbleized pattern she created will become a part of the book she will make in Beth Bryant's second-grade class at Ellis School. Theresa Hagerty, Chelsea's mother, is just as excited as her daughter, but for different reasons. "[Chelsea's] dyslexic, so she has some struggles reading and writing. The way she needs to learn is hands on. She has to hear it, see it, touch it," Hagerty said. "[Image-Making] is wonderful. It gives her something fun to look forward to to help her reading and writing." Chelsea, along with hundreds of other students in the Sunnyvale School District, is participating in the program Image-Making Within the Writing Process. Twenty-five Sunnyvale teachers have been using the Image-Making method for the last two years as a creative way to improve their students' reading and writing skills. Image-Making is an innovative, federally funded program in which students develop a story from pictures they create through artwork. Students are given the opportunity to use their creativity in making colorful textured papers by using sponges, salt, plastic wrap, bubbles and Plexiglas. "It combines all the skills of reading and writing with art. It's an application of it," said Diane Timko, a third-grade teacher at Lakewood School and the language arts mentor for the district. In conjunction with reading and writing lessons throughout the academic year, students use their artistic talents to make collages out of their papers and to visualize the characters of their stories. Using their papers, they create and tell the story to the class. By the time students are ready write, they have shared their stories with their classmates so often the tales are memorized, Bryant said. "Students benefit from the sharing and the binding of the pictures and the imagination much more so than just handing students a plain piece of paper and saying 'Write a story.' And I know that's the way that it's been done for years," she added. In the end, students create an illustrated book that is bound complete with a title, dedication and author page. "It's a culmination for the academic year," said Mark Pool, whose fourth-grader, Emily, 9, has participated in Image-Making at San Miguel School since the second grade. "Everything focuses into the artwork because it's not just artwork. It's also storytelling. There's creativity, expression--both verbally and artistically--project completion and a reward for actually having produced something. It's their book. The operative word is 'their,' as in their personal book." Traditionally, teachers tell students to write a story on a blank piece of paper and then later illustrate it. In Image-Making, the students allow their imaginations to run wild by searching for stories in their art before they write even one word. "The children see their story in their heads visually with their imagination and the creative process before they ever write it," Bryant said. "With a child, when you hand them a piece of paper and say write a story, many of them don't have enough experience or enough pictures in their head. And what can they write about? They end up with what I call 'I like' things. This way they see their story in their heads and in the colored paper." According to a just-completed research study analyzing the effectiveness of Image-Making, students who completed the Image-Making process were better writers. During the 1997-98 academic year, researchers studied 550 first- and second-graders in New Hampshire, Texas and Hawaii to measure the impact of Image-Making vs. a more traditional language arts program. Students received scores based on sense of setting, sequence, use of descriptive language, voice and beginning, middle and end. Students using Image-Making scored four times higher than those in traditional writing programs, said Beth Olshansky, creator of Image-Making. "By the end of the year, writing scores of students in [Image-Making] groups were double those in the comparison group," she said. Ninety-seven percent of the students using Image-Making scored the equivalent of a B average or better. "Within that group, 79 percent scored an A or an A-plus," Olshansky said. Students in a traditional language arts program did not fare as well. In the comparison group, 91 percent scored the equivalent of a C or lower. Of that group, 66 percent scored a D or an F. Eight percent of the students in the comparison group scored a B while 1 percent scored an A. None scored an A-plus. Sally Webb, a retired school teacher, introduced Image-Making to the Sunnyvale School District three years ago. "What I like about [Image-Making] is it appeals to every child from the truly gifted to the average student," Webb said. Webb is currently the project coordinator, but beginning next year, it is up to each school to purchase and organize the art supplies. Image-Making is done primarily in the first through third grades, but a kindergarten class at San Miguel School and an eighth-grade special education class at Sunnyvale Middle School also participated last year. "There's a lot of self-satisfaction where the children are concerned. I think the best part is the end result. The child has a book for a lifetime. They can look at it and say look what I did in first, second or third grade," Lakewood's Timko said. "A school is based on success and this is the success kids can do. Even the lowest achievers can come through." During the first two years of the program, Larry Campbell, general manager of American Business Communications and the owner, Dee Tozer, color-copied and bound books for 150 students. Each child received three copies: one to keep, one for the teacher and one for the school library. On Oct. 23 the district is honoring Campbell for his effort with a certificate of recognition in a ceremony at San Miguel. Developed during the late 1980s and first launched as a pilot program in New Hampshire public schools in 1990, Image-Making is now used in 35 states and three U.S. territories. Webb believes that Sunnyvale was the first school district in California to utilize Image-Making. Currently, 300 teachers in San Jose have also been trained in Image-Making. Olshansky created the process when she watched her then 6-year-old daughter, Misa, struggle with learning how to read and write. Misa is currently 18 and a freshman in college. "I never intended to develop [Image-Making]," Olshansky said. "The ironic thing was, as I watched my own daughter struggling, I remembered what a terrible time I had [learning] to read. I was also a visual learner." Using her artistic background, Olshansky began using art as a vehicle for story making. She invited the neighborhood children to her back porch and held summer programs. Noticing that it was helpful not just to Misa, but to the other children who also had a preference for visual learning, Olshansky took the program to the New Hampshire State Council on Arts. The group backed Image-Making and it began its pilot run in 1990. In 1993, the original research study on Image-Making was validated when the U.S. Department of Education made it a federally funded program. For more information about Image-Making or the research results, email eja@christa.unh.edu or call the University of New Hampshire at 603/862-3691 between 8:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. [ Back to Contents Page | Sunnyvale Sun Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, October 21, 1998. ©1998 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.