Our seventh grade English teacher, Kacie Simpson, always comes up with great projects connected to the books her classes read. This year, after reading S.E. Hinton’s classic, The Outsiders, pairs of students created these “Body Bios.” Each poster depicts a character from The Outsiders, alongside visual metaphors and quotes to represent their inner character and history. Below is a sample “Ponyboy” poster, by Angie and Yihan, with all of its parts explained.

Kacie says that even the kids who weren’t great artists learned from the work. For instance, one student drew a character as a square, because he thought it was funny (or perhaps had played too much Minecraft!). Ms. Simpson told him he had to have a purpose behind his choice of shape that connected to the book. Giving a presentation was part of the assignment, so when he presented to the class, this student connected the shape to the character being strong like a rock, which showed Kacie that he’d actually put some thought into it. Here are a few more samples of the posters.