Year 9 are reading W. H. Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts', whose second stanza describes Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the painting in Brussels long attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The teacher reads the poem aloud while the museum's high-resolution image on Google Arts & Culture fills the board, and zooms in on each detail as Auden names it: the ploughman who 'may / Have heard the splash', the sun shining 'on the white legs disappearing into the green / Water', and 'the expensive delicate ship'. Students, whose handout carries the painting as a small reproduction where Icarus's legs are barely visible, watch the details appear in the order the poem finds them. The teacher then reads the poem a second time without stopping, and students write a paragraph in their books on why Auden leaves Icarus until late in the poem, as the painter leaves him in a corner of the picture.
Tools: Google Arts & Culture Nine ideas for your own version in Generate
This page is one of a growing set of PICRAT examples by cell, subject and grade. Page maintained by Andy Perryer.