Project Approach
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Extending a Portrait Project
Yesterday I shared one of my all-time favorite back to school activities – creating self-portraits. Today, I want to share some ideas for extending the learning that you’ve begun with this activity. If your students really enjoy this activity, pay attention to how they are working, and which aspects of the project seem to draw their attention. If the children are especially interested in inspecting their own features in the mirror, then you might consider taking close up photos of their facial features. You could then print these photos and explore them in a few different ways. First you could encourage the children to figure out which features belong to…
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Ideas for displaying children’s work
It is pretty standard to display student work in the classroom, I could go on and on about the many different reasons that this is a great idea, but I think that we all get it, we want our students to be proud of the work that they do, and we want to show them that it has value. My goal has always been to display as much of my students’ work as possible, without wallpapering my walls in it. I want my classroom to look neat, and uncluttered, and I want displays to make sense and be aesthetically pleasing. Here are some examples of the ways that I have…
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Google Drive Student Portfolios
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My documentation process
Documentation is something that has become a natural piece of my job as a teacher. I am constantly taking notes about what my students are doing. It’s one of those things that I do without thinking, those notes are so important because I can take my scribbled notes and turn them into a polished documentation, having the notes already written down cuts my panel-making process in half. Even though my notes save me tons of time, the role that I’m in at my new school doesn’t leave a ton of time for creating panels and other items that I really want to do for the classroom. I’ve solved this problem…
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Exploring Knowledge Creatively
During our preparations for Valentine’s Day, we have also begun our class project for the semester with some very basic discussion of tornadoes. The boys are fascinated, and when I was finally able to get out our tornado tube they dropped everything and worked with it for an entire afternoon. This was some of the most authentic learning I have seen in months, and at that moment I knew that we had found that coveted project topic They have a pretty good understanding of the basics, seeing as we get some pretty bad storms in the summer months, and most of my students were affected in some way by a…
