Using Images to Channel Student Intuition about School

I have been doing this activity for several years with older private school students and public university students. I give them a set of images I have collected over the years that could symbolize any number of feelings about the school year in indirect manners. In my new job as 6th grade teacher at a public middle school, I was wondering just what these images would elicit from my students. I asked them to look at the images, choose one that seemed to represent something about their school year, then spend some time describing the image in writing. Then I gave them a sentence starter: This image represents me because....

Here are a couple of example:

I did this activity with my English class of students from our Spanish Immersion Program. It took about 30 minutes. I was impressed with the positive energy expressed by most and the sense of fear from other. I thought that the Rock picture interpretation by the first student was particularly poignant. I hope I am not just stacking her again.