Ten Visual Aid Art and Craft Ideas for Literature Presentations

Introducing arts and crafts into the core curriculum of classrooms has significantly helped English, Literature, and Language Arts teachers succeed in making learning fun. Specifically, high school Literature was one of my favorite classes in that visual aids were required as part of our literature presentations. For the novel, Siddhartha, I remember making a diorama that portrayed the major symbols. Because art and craft projects help to engage students especially in reading assignments, middle and high school students will benefit from the following ten arts and craft ideas for literature presentations.

Board or Card Game

A board or card game is a great craft idea for analyzing the characters and events from a book. One example of a game to model after is Guess Who. This game can be created by drawing each character's face in full detail and writing his/her name underneath. Two players take turns asking up to 20 yes/no questions about characters' physical traits to guess the identity of the mystery person. Sample deduction questions include "Does the character wear glasses?" "Is the character a child?" Does the character have curly hair?

Character Photo Shoot

A great photography craft idea is to choose one character from the novel and design or put together an outfit that the character would wear based on his/her personality and the setting. Pose as the character would and describe the photos during your class presentation.

Collage

A simple craft idea to use as a visual aid is a collage, an arrangement of pictures glued to a poster. I have made a number of collages using a poster board, magazine images, scissors, and glue. Drawings may also be used to depict characters and scenes of a book.

Diorama

As mentioned above, I have a vivid memory of creating a diorama for my high school visual book report on the novel Siddhartha. A diorama is simply a 3-D visual model that many students make to convey the setting, a scene, a symbol, the main idea, or the tone of a book. Dioramas are often crafted using shoe boxes, clip art or drawings, scissors and glue.

Gift or Greeting Card

When Literature students are assigned visual book reports during the holiday season, some ideal craft ideas are to create greeting cards or gifts for the main characters of a novel based on their personalities and interests. Students can then explain their reason for choosing the card or gift.

Mobile

Most students are familiar with crafting mobiles, or hanging structures, for visual book reports particularly when portraying symbols in a novel. Mobiles are commonly crafted with wire coat hangers, triangular and rectangular hole-punched cards, images, and string.

Model

Models composed of pottery clay, paper mache, fabric/yarn and stuffing are neat craft ideas for visual book reports. They may represent important characters, objects, or symbols within a book that can be tagged with description cards.

Scrapbook

A fun visual book report craft idea is to create a scrapbook that illustrates the novels main characters, symbols, settings, and scenes. Specifically, if a wedding is one of the events in a novel, drawings or clip art can be added to sequentially describe this event.

TV Show

A very unique craft idea for visual book reports is to create a TV show designed by cutting two slits through the base of a corrugated or shoe box; wrapping illustrated paper around a rolling pin and sliding it through the slits, scene by scene. The illustrations will contain characters and scenes from the book and can be accompanied by an audio tape when the TV show is presented.

Visual Timeline

While the average timeline is composed of numbers and words to describe dates and events, a visual timeline includes illustrations that are drawn, printed out, or cut out from a magazine and designed on long, rolled out paper or poster board. The images depict events and scenes and their time periods.

Overall, all of these hands-on art and craft ideas for literature presentations are excellent for students who are visual learners. Involving visual aids engages students and makes reading fun by bringing variety into the classroom. Even more, these reading craft projects bring out the creative sides of all students.

Sources

Feber, J. Creative Book Reports: Fun Projects.Google Books.

"HS-Visual Book Report-Diorama."ABC Teach website.

"More Ideas Than You'll Ever Use For Book Reports."Teach Net website.