Still life drawings provide the young artist with an excellent opportunity to highlight nouns in his work. The idea of a still life is to capture a scene and freeze it in time, so verbs are taken out of the equation. Other paintings attempt to capture motion, such as running or playing, which detracts from the focus from nouns. Directing students to use charcoal pencils instead of paints or markers removes color adjectives from the project as well. The subject of the drawings does not matter as long as it is clearly a person, place or thing.
Bring a favorite place to life with a diorama. Have students bring in shoe boxes and use them to create a special place. Provide materials such as pipe-cleaners to bend into rivers or flowers, thin sheets of cardboard to shape into furniture or mountains, and cotton balls to form clouds or the bodies of animals.
Allow each student a lot of artistic freedom in order to keep the focus on the collection of nouns she is creating rather than on the creative process. Emphasize that color and actions are different parts of speech, and each student should focus on the thing itself to reinforce idea that nouns are concrete things.
Use a team approach to create artistic representations of different sets of nouns by creating mobiles. Separate the class into groups of three or four students each. Assign each group either a "person," "place" or "thing" topic. Allow the students in the group to refine it.
For example, students with a "thing" topic might choose to focus on modes of transportation. Have each student within that group draw two items relating to transportation, such as a "car" and an "airplane." Alternately, students might be allowed to cut pictures out of magazines or download them from the Internet.
Once the pictures are collected, have students glue them to cardboard circles. Create a mobile for each group by attaching the circles to hangers with string and hang them around your classroom.
Illustrations help young readers understand text. You can use art to reinforce your students' emerging ability to comprehend written language without author-provided illustrations. Provide students with a paragraph-length story featuring a strong character, or describing a place. Prompt students to draw a picture of the central noun in the passage. Remind your class that you are not focusing on actions, rather you are looking for pictures of a person, place or thing in the drawings.