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Mind Sketching and Other Strategies for Building Academic Literacy in Gifted Students Raised in Poverty

How we get our Language

As a young girl, Joyce Juntune walked from her family’s small farm into town to buy groceries every week. As they followed the train tracks into town, her mother would call out, “Girls, look there’s a train! See the locomotive! There’s the engineer! Wave to the engineer! Count the cars, one, two, three, four, five!”

Week after week her mother would reinforce these basic verbal processing skills.

To this day, she still counts the cars anytime she passes a train. “I look back and that’s where I got my language,” she recalls. “It was because my mother used the environment every day to help me see something.”

Unfortunately many children who are raised in poverty or low-incomes households don’t benefit from these early verbal language building exercises.

Gifted children raised in poverty are particularly at-risk, but that doesn’t have to be the case. These children can succeed. They can go to college. They can do wonderful things if someone will take the time to build their complex language skills and verbal memory.

In “Strategies for Building Academic Literacy in Gifted Students Raised in Poverty” a 1-hour course, Joyce Juntune, Ph.D shares concepts and ideas from her own experience in helping students raised in poverty to build complex language skills.

You probably already know Dr. Juntune as a renowned consultant, trainer, professor, and lecturer with more than 45 years of experience in the field of education. She is an instructional associate professor at Texas A&M University, and she teaches graduate-level courses in her expert areas of intelligence, child and adolescent development, educational psychology, giftedness, and creativity.

If you get them to sketch it, they can share it!

One of the best ways to develop complex language skills in a gifted student raised in poverty is using the non-verbal strength to build verbal abilities. One tool Dr. Juntune has found extremely effective is mind sketching.

Sketching is not the same thing as drawing. When a student draws a picture, it demonstrates his or her understanding of a concept.

Sketching is a form of abstraction, the child should draw the basic idea with little detail and few line. Later, that sketch acts as a mental cue to help the child’s brain recall a concept and explain it.

Here’s the basic difference:

• A drawing speaks for itself
• A sketch needs to be explained

Sketching works because the brain doesn’t need all the details all the time

In this course, Dr. Juntune takes participants through an actual mind sketching exercise, presents various models and exercises, and explains why this method works.

One concept model is the Listen > Sketch > Talk model.

Students are asked to listen to a sentence or two, sketch the sentence, and then explain their sketch to a partner. The students hears, sees, and then explains the idea in a complete sentence. Thus using non-verbal skills to produce verbal ones.

Juntune suggest three basic levels of mind sketching:

• Listen, Sketch, Talk
• Read, Sketch, Order/Sequence
• Read, Sketch, Order/Sequence, Talk, Write

“A tree is tall and a bush is…?”

A bush is short, of course. You probably knew what came next without even thinking about it. That’s because you understand language relationship. Opposites are an abstraction – a complex language skill. A child raised in poverty might often respond to that same statement with an answer of “bush” or “tree” or perhaps nothing at all.

Dr. Juntune explains how the concept of verbal and nonverbal memory relate to abstraction, and she offers several activities that will help students build verbal memory.

With just a few sheets of paper and a pen, you can practice mind sketching right along with the participants of this course. By practicing this technique as it is taught, you’ll be better prepared to use this tool in your classroom.

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