Tell THIS story

It’s assessment time again, and I was looking for something different to assign for my writing assessment this semester other than the usual “here’s your topic.” I’ve always loved using picture prompts for writing because so many of us are visual learners, and it’s neat to see how the same picture can elicit such a variety of stories. In my quest for bizarre and interesting picture prompts, I stumbled onto a slideshare that was created with 150 awesome pictures for story writing. (Thank you, Kevin Cummins)Some of them were so good that it was hard for my students to choose which story they wanted to tell. It’s so nice when an assessment doesn’t feel like an assessment, isn’t it?

So, if you’re looking to put a little spin on your next writing assessment, or if you are just looking for a fun task board or class writing assignment, give this one a try. Your students will love it!

150 Amazing Writing prompts Pictures from Kevin Cummins

Paint like an Egyptian

Last week’s art lesson was too good not to post… As you know, we’ve been studying ancient civilizations, specifically the ancient Egyptians, and what unit would be complete without a look at the influence of art?

Because the ancient Egyptians were the first to introduce written language through hieroglyphics and because the symbolism used by the Egyptians is relatively easy to replicate, I decided to let it guide us through art last week. I found this lesson over at Ms. Picasso’s art room. Check it out here. Here’s what we did:

Find a god/goddess-inspired picture that you like and transfer the image with pencil onto a nice, thick piece of paper. You can also add a couple of hieroglyphic symbols around the picture just to jazz it up. After your drawing is complete, trace over the pencil with a black permanent marker. * Make sure you use permanent marker or else it will bleed later on when you add watercolor* Once your black marker outline is complete, sponge paint over it with brown, yellow, and/or orange acrylic paints until it looks old. Finally, once the acrylic paints have dried, apply just a splash of watercolor to a few parts of the piece… be sure not to overdo it with the color as you want it to look as authentic as possible. Here are a few of our completed pieces. I think they turned out great, what do you think?

 

 

Ancient Egypt Lapbook

Sorry about my absence, folks. It’s been a whirlwind of a week here with history, literacy month, field trips, and upcoming parent-teacher conferences. I don’t have a whole lot of time to post this, but I really wanted to share these super awesome lapbooks that we started last week for our unit on ancient civilizations. I got the idea here, and adapted it a bit to meet the needs of my own classroom.

What I love about lapbooks and foldables is that they are fun and engaging for even the most hesitant of learners. I find that when you leave it up to them to be the researcher, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what stuff they come up with. Plus, these projects make for the perfect lesson on summarization and being concise with language because there’s not a lot of writing space available. This forces them to ask themselves essential questions like Is this information relevant? and Is this information important?

In my class, we divided up the research into categories- new vocabulary, daily life, religion, mummies, pyramids, geography, Nile, hieroglyphics, and jobs. Then, we all took a category and went to work researching and collecting data in our theme notebooks. Once we were done researching, we came together as a class and shared our findings, being sure to sift out the “meaty” bits that we’d copy into our lapbooks. We aren’t quite finished with them yet, but they are really coming together nicely and I wanted to share this small victoryJ I hope you’re all enjoying your week. Check out the pictures below!