Surrealism in the Classroom!

After teaching a unit on Belgium I also introduced surrealism art through the art of René Magritte the famous Belgian Surrealist artist.  We looked at a variety of pictures by Magritte and then I asked them to create their own piece of "surrealism".  This is the perfect opportunity for students to get cross-curricular credit from another course, mainly from Art or if you offer a segment of Art History this will also work.  This dual credit is of course negotiated with the Art teacher in advance.  The students that negotiated cross-curricular credit did large paintings in the Surrealism style.  They were extraordinary!  The student samples here are ones that were for my class alone.  Each student had to not only produce a piece of Surrealistic art but they also had to describe it using a wide variety of adjectives that we had learned and also use a specific number of "sentence patterns" that I had given to them.  I like to use "guided sentence patterns" in some of my activities as it forces the students to raise to a level that I desire them to write at.  It also helps to introduce a variety of sentence structures that they might not normally think about.  I was amazed and thrilled at the art and creativity that my students produced for me.  I did not mark their "art" but enjoyed immensely what they had produced.  It was a required component to the assignment and was considered a "given" to be done, but I gave the "graded marks" towards their French written piece.  On "presentation" day I used the inside/outside circle activity for students to share their work in French with each other!  Lots of fun!