EXTENSIONS & ACTIVITIES

WRITING WARM-UP: INVERSION

To start a lesson or class, have your students analyze a piece of art. Allow them plenty of time to read the piece and even practice annotating it. After this, then have them decide which poem best fits the piece of art - rather than vice versa. Then encourage them to discuss and reflect how they read the art, how they chose a poem, and what they learned from this process in pairs, small groups, then as an entire class,

MINI-RESEARCHERS

Much like the methodology that occurred to produce this website, a simple internet search can produce very fruitful results. Have your students look for their own primary sources at local art museums, or through The MET or MoMA. They can use these pieces to read the art, or to connect to a poem by Hughes, or even to practice researching. 

EXTENSION QUESTIONS

• What does it mean when a tourist is also an artist and creator, such as Langston Hughes?

• What artifacts do you think other artists would collect? What postcards would Abraham Lincoln, Marilyn Monroe, Pablo Picasso, or Walt Whitman collect? 

• How else do we see the literary world embracing popular culture? 

• Do we see, experience, or favor Langston Hughes as a writer, an artist, a creator, or something else entirely? Why? How does this impact our understanding of all of his work? 

• With so many visuals available to link to Hughes, what music can connect to him as well? How does the medium of music, when paired with the written word, compare to that of the visual?

• What medium is best for portraying Hughes? Music, poetry, photograph, visual art, or something else? Why?

ARTS INTEGRATION: DRAW

For a classroom activity, have your students select one of the poems from this website, or found elsewhere, and have your students craft a Broadside. Prentiss Taylor's work with "The Big-Timer" can be used a model. To scaffold this lesson have your students first "draw the poem" - and create a visual representation for what the written word is expressing. Then students can use this create a full Broadside. As a class, you can then host a museum walk where students walk around the classroom looking at all the different Broadsides and talking reflective notes on how these bring out different elements of the written word.

PERSONIFY A POEM

With so much focus drawn to visuals that are available to connect to Hughes's work, your students may find it beneficial to practice their own connection-making skills while also making the material more accessible for your students that are not visual-learners. Ask your students to choose a poem, then explain and justify the attributing five senses that would correspond with this poem.

IMAGE VOTE

For an engagement or wrapping-up activity, have your students vote or debate on which images they think best align or situate themselves with a given poem. For example, does Basquiat's Jim Crow or Aaron Douglas's illustration better fit or illuminate "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" - and why? This could be utilized as a stand-along activity, or one that branches into a paper or writing reflection.

THE WEARY BLUES

Langston Hughes is worldly recognized as a blue poet, and the writer who pioneered this genre. Have your students listen and watch Hughes read his poem "The Weary Blues" set to music. Then, ask your students about this blues genre: What is the music like? What is the poetry like? How does the blues make us feel, and why? Why are the blues important? Then, ask your students to hypothesize and justify what a blues painting would be like.

UNIT THEME: VISUAL LITERACY

In an ever-increasingly visual world, your students interact with visuals in so many different ways - every day. From Instagram to info-graphics, your students need to be able to read an image and understand the argument or message it presents, not only in your classroom but in the world beyond it. Constructing a unit around this skill will help prepare your students for this, as well as give them guided practice. The images and poems found on this website can be utilized independently or in tandem with other art pieces, films, or movies.

JOURNEY-BOX

A Journey-Box is a box or container that holds primary sources and artifacts that students can interact and engage with. The Journey-Box has been found to be effective for social studies and elementary level lessons, yet it could be heavily effective through its utilization in the English classroom. This activity could lay the groundwork for historical, cultural, and social contextualization and immersion, while also acting as a scaffold for a student-crafted project as a summative assessment. According to Labbo and Field (1999), the goal of a Journey-Box is to take students on a journey through the artifacts; they must contextualize and collect data from the artifacts, while exploring their significance and meaning. From this archive, you could collect numerous postcards, photographs, and other primary sources to create a Langston Hughes Journey-Box and have students interact with this form of media collection before working with a greater scope of materials.

STUDENTS AS TRAVELERS