A possible use for Adobe Photoshop

Adobe PhotoShop can be helpful to educators in many ways.  It is an extremely versatile tool!  The sample student activity above demonstrates one way Adobe PhotoShop might be used with a third grade class.  Sarah, Plain and Tall, by Patricia MacLachlan is a very well written story with a lot of imagery and figurative language.  Throughout the book, Sarah, who is the main character, is experiencing an emotional struggle between returning home to the family she misses and staying and developing a relationship with her new family.  Her feelings change from chapter to chapter.  In this case, the teacher might have students manipulate an image of themselves on a continuum to represent how they think Sarah is in a story is feeling after each chapter.  The students would also be asked to explain their thinking and support their ideas with examples from the book.  This lesson plan would specifically address the CT State Content Standard #1, which relates to Reading and Responding To Texts.  This standard states that: "Students will read and respond in individual, literal, critical and evaluative ways to literary, informational and persuasive texts."    Some of the objectives listed under this standard include having the students:  

	a.     describe the thoughts, opinions and questions that arise as they read, view or listen to a text and use relevant information from the text to summarize the content
	b.     use what they know to identify or infer important characters, settings, themes, events, ideas, relationships or details within a work
	c.     analyze, elaborate on and respond critically to works
	d.     identify the type of text and use strategies (talking and writing, utilizing graphic organizers, drawing, listing, creating time lines, etc.) to accomplish a range of reading tasks
	e.     ask and answer their own and each other’s literal and inferential text-related questions
	f.     listen to, read and view texts, tell periodically how they think texts will turn out, then read to decide if their predictions prove accurate
	This use of Adobe PhotoShop corresponds to all of the objectives listed above.  In addition, this lesson idea could be adapted to a number of reading lessons.  For example, a teacher could present students with a persuasive essay and ask them to choose and defend a perspective of their own using the above continuum.