Using Student Doodles

Google Doodle from 3/31/11

Seeing Google's Doodle for today jogged my memory of an idea I had while brainstorming with a teacher a while back for new and creative ideas for book projects. With all of the creative ways graphic designers and artists have dressed up the Google logo over the years, why couldn't students do the same thing with a book title? Have the students start with the title of the book on the paper and use the letters to draw something to represent the book. This image could represent the main characters, the conflict, an important scene, the setting, a theme -- the ideas are endless. As part of the assignment, the students would present their "Book Doodle" to the class and explain why they chose what they did.

If you want to see some examples or show your students examples of Google's various Doodles over the years, Google has them all collected here.

This could easily be adapted for almost any subject. Instead of a book title, one could replace it with a concept, a vocabulary word, a country, a person's name, or an event. If the assignment was for a country, the letters of the country's name could be transformed to represent the main religion, the top industry, the government, the flag, and other facts for that country. For a concept, the students could transform the words "life cycle" into a doodle to show the teacher that they understood the concept. I'm sure you could think of some fabulous ways to adapt this to use with your students.