Onomatopoeia Art

I love when we can find ways to integrate art into any other areas of curriculum. Traditional literacy doesn’t have to stop at simple reading and writing. Visual and alternative literacies are becoming more and more important in the contemporary world and accessing global communities.

This project asked students to think about the meaning communicated in shape and colour, and to find a synthesis between their chosen onomatopoeia word and the message they want to portray. This activity was a fun wrap-up to a unit on figurative language devices where we learned about simile, metaphor, hyperbole, alliteration, personification and idiom!

We had lots of fun watching videos in class that explained some of these devices that you can watch below! Cue cringing students at Miss. V’s cheesy videos. Warning: the onomatopoeia video is a tad aggressive!

This was a successful lesson taught online during the lockdown period, and we ended up showing off our creations on camera over Google Classroom. Some students didn’t have access to newspapers or magazines to cut up as the background collage, so I provided print-outs of text-heavy pages as well as many suggestions on alternatives to complete the project. I think it’s always super helpful for students to see what the difference between level 2 and level 4 work looks like, and of course, I made my own version during the work period in real-time but made myself available to help out as the students completed theirs.