Visual Arts

It is the assertion of this article that students who use visual art as a prewriting stimulus are composing their ideas both in images and in words. The result of the art creation process allows students the distance to, add details, and create more coherent text. The process of writing is more than putting words on a piece of paper. Effective authors are able to create imagery and to communicate ideas using well-chosen words, phrases, and text structures. Emergent writers struggle with the mechanics of the writing process, i.e. fine motor control for printing legibly, recall of spelling patterns, and the use of syntax and grammar rules. As a result, texts were written by young writers be simplistic and formulaic. The artwork facilitates the writing process, resulting in a text that is richer in sensory detail and more intricate than the more traditional writing-first crayon drawing-second approach .