LESSON 6
DREAMS

Living in a Dream World

1. Show students the images on page 41, or find artwork online from famous surrealist artists, such as Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Joan Miró, or Max Ernst, to show students.
2. Ask students to describe what they see in the artwork. What elements of the artwork are similar? What elements are different? What elements do not seem real?
3. Introduce the concept of surrealism to students. Tell students that surrealism is a cultural movement in art, film, and literature that began in the 1920s. The surrealist style of art uses fantasy and imagination to create dream-like images.
4. Tell students they will be creating their own surrealist drawings. Their drawings should express their dreams, imagination, and fantasies.
5. One way to prepare is to have students keep a dream journal for a few days to a week. In the dream journal, students should write down what they remember from their dreams when they wake up in the morning. Some students may only remember fragments of dreams, while others may remember complete dreams. In any case, students should try to write down the things they remember dreaming about (people, places, and events). The dream journal will help students compose their surrealist dream drawing.
6. Pass out paper and pencils to students.
7. Tell students to begin drawing. Give students a minimum number of elements to include in their drawings, such as four or five different objects or people. The minimum number of elements will help make sure that students’ drawings contain enough objects to make the preposition of place language component of this activity successful.
8. Remind students that their drawings do not need to “make sense” and that their drawings can be as “crazy” or “weird” as they like. Surrealist drawings are supposed to represent dreams, fantasy, and imagination.

1. Review or introduce prepositions to students. Prepositions are words that show the relationship between a noun and another word or element in the sentence. Prepositions can have many purposes, but generally they give information about a place, direction, or time. This activity will focus on prepositions of place.
2. As a warm-up activity, hide classroom items in different locations around the classroom.
3. Either write or say directions that students have to follow to find the hidden items.
4. Use prepositions of place in the directions to find the hidden item. For example: “Walk between the rows of desks, near the classroom wall, check behind the door, and then above the filing cabinet.”
5. Divide students into small groups. Each group should hide an item or two and then write directions to find the item(s), using prepositions of place. Groups should then switch directions and try to find the hidden items.
6. To recap the prepositions of place used in this activity, have students act out the prepositions. Call out a preposition of place, and have students act out that preposition. For example, if you said “above,” they might point to the space above their heads.

1. With a partner, have students use their drawings to write sentences using common prepositions of place, with the help of the chart at the end of this chapter. Make copies of the chart or draw it on the board. *NOTE: There are six different prepositions of place included in the chart below. Modify the prepositions included in the chart if there are specific prepositions of place you would like students to work on. Other prepositions of place may include at, behind, below, beneath, beside, by, in, inside, near, opposite, or over.

   Preposition	Example Sentence with Preposition
   above	The maze is above the eyes on the head.
   across	The clock is across from the head.
   between	The statue is between the door and the mountain.
   next to	The statue is next to the door.
   on	The maze is on the head.
   under	The eyes on the head are under the maze.

2. Break students up into six groups, and assign each group one of the prepositions. Each group then has to use the image below to create two or three sentences using their preposition.
3. Once each group has come up with two or three sentences for their preposition, have students form new groups. The new groups should have one student from each of the former groups, so that each group member will have created sentences for a different preposition.
4. Each group member should take turns introducing his or her preposition and demonstrating the preposition with the surrealist image. Other group members should fill in sentences for the new preposition on their charts.

1. Use students’ surrealist dream drawings to further illustrate prepositions of place.
2. Have students find a partner. One student describes his or her surrealist dream drawing (the objects in the drawing, where the objects are located, etc.) to a partner, using prepositions.
3. As one partner describes his or her drawing, the other partner tries to redraw the image based on the description. Once completed, they can compare the two drawings. This activity can also be completed in small groups.

1. Have students write a paragraph to accompany their drawings.
2. Students can describe where their ideas for the drawing come from, why they chose the images in the drawing, or what their feelings about the drawing are.

EXAMPLES OF SURREALISM

PREPOSITION PRACTICE!