First I had the students brainstorm what rainbows and roses symbolized. Then we moved on to the article. The students were challenged to find out by the end of the article why it was entitled "No Rainbows, No Roses." Then I read to them paragraph by paragraph, stopping to ask them questions at the end of each paragraph.
When we came to the third paragraph, which described what the cancer patient Mrs. Trane looked like in detail, after reading it once, I had Li-hsuen (陳立軒) draw the picture on the blackboard while I read the paragraph again, sentence by sentence.
The following is the paragraph:
"Mrs. Trane lies motionless: her head seems unusually large and, except for a little fine gray hair around the ears, is bald from the chemotherapy that had offered brief hope; her skin is dark yellow and sags loosely around exaggerated long bones taht not even a gown can disguise; her right arm lies straight out, taped cruelly to a board to secure access for the IV fluid; her left arm lies across her sunken chest, which rises and falls in uneven waves of artificial respiration."
This is what Li-hsuen drew:
Well done! The class applauded.
Of course, during the process, he had to make some modifications according to my reading. For example, at first he drew a big head with a lot of hair, but once he heard the word "bald," he corrected it. Then when I repeated the part "except for a little fine gray hair around the ears," he put some hair around the ears.
This is a variation of dictation. Done once in a while, it is fun.
One thing good about this activity is that we can have the students describe the picture using the language they have just learned.
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