Back in Time- Class Museum Project

WOW, what a week it has been over here! We’ve just finished up our final unit project on ancient civilizations with a way too big museum exhibit for the entire school. It was a heck of a lot of work, but we’ve received some great feedback from all of our visitors- we even made it onto the school website, so I thought I’d share it in a post here.

For this unit, we’ve been focusing on the ancient Egyptians and their daily lives in class. Additionally, the kiddos chose their own ancient civilizations to research about to create a FULL-BLOWN history museum exhibit. They had to find relevant details about the history and culture of their chosen civilizations and display their findings in the form of a museum exhibit, complete with ancient artifacts. Here are the guidelines that I gave to them weeks ago. Last Wednesday, each class in the school was assigned a time slot and given admission (raffle) tickets to visit our newly remodeled classroom that was transformed into a museum!!!

Here are a few snapshots of our big day… If you have any pointers or want to know more in detail what I did, feel free to leave a comment.

Hope you are surviving what’s left of the school year. 6 more weeks on this end, and the official countdown has begun. Cheers- Happy Friday!

All dressed up and ready to go

All about the Egyptians

Minh Chi reporting live from ancient Rome

Winnie in ancient Greece

Nhu teaching about ancient China

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!

 

Digital Posters- Earth Science

 Sorry I’ve been MIA for a few days… I’ve been in the throes of planning and coordinating all kinds of stuff like Dr. Seuss week, our 100 days celebration, school Olympics, oh, and this little thing I do on the side called TEACHING. I’m starting to feel like I didn’t just have a week off!

Anyway, back to the real postJ We’re about a week and a half into our earth science unit and my kids have their first assignment due after the weekend; a digital poster collage about Earth’s layers and plate tectonics. Exciting stuff, folks!

I found the link for an online poster creator while I was browsing the community shares on edmodo and thought to myself, “Self, that’s a great idea. You should use that in your class.” So that’s exactly what I did for this assignment.

The website’s called glogster and basically, it’s just a graphics blog that allows students to design their very own posters using fun graphics, pictures, videos, and so much more. What makes this website even cooler? They have a separate page just for education so you don’t have to worry about them seeing anything they aren’t supposed to! Pretty neat, huh?

Check out the example poster I started along with my project guidelines below, and stay tuned for their finished posters, which I’ll add later. Happy almost Friday!

Digital Poster Project Guidelines

New Year, new theme... geography

I don’t know about you, but the holiday break was just what I needed after the busy first semester. I’m feeling rejuvenated and ready to take on the new year and was even lucky enough to spend the holidays with my mom. How can you beat that?

Anyway, today was my first day back and I got straight to work on the plan for the new theme unit on geography. I can’t tell you how excited I am about this theme because I’ve always been fascinated by the people and places around me. I love how diverse our planet is and I can’t wait to get my kids excited about geography. When I was deciding which direction to take this unit, I thought it would be best to go deeper into certain areas rather than trying to cover too much in such a short time. If you’re like me, you have a tendency to get overwhelmed at the possibilities and areas within a subject area… It’s completely normal.

Here’s what we’re doing for our geography unit:

Written Travel Guide

-          Write a Lonely Planet travel guide that is informative and entertaining including the following:

·         Country or region

·         Geography

·         Climate

·         Language

·         Population

·         Culture

·         Tradition

·         Currency

·         Festivals

·         Important information

 

Create a Video, Skit, or Puppet Show

·         Script is written, rehearsed, and presented to class

·         Costumes, props, or visual aids are made

·         Content must showcase something unique to a specific culture

 

Teach an art lesson to the class

·         Choose a famous artist, art piece, or time period

·         Research the culture or history

·         Re-create it

·         Plan and teach an art lesson about it to the class





Here's a copy of my Understanding By Design Lesson for this unit. Feel free to copy or adapt for your own class.

Thematic Teaching

Our school is using a thematic approach to cross-curriculum teaching. The idea behind a thematic approach is to weave a strong central theme into as many subjects as possible so as to foster a deeper learning and meaning for the student. Here’s an overview of how we’re applying the thematic approach to teach a variety of subjects all linked together through this central theme unit of Citizenship & Government. Our first unit is 5 weeks, but most are 4.

Citizenship & Government in Language Arts

·         Reading- we’re starting the year with non-fiction texts so I chose the story of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. I wasn’t sure what levels my readers would be so I decided that a book with easy language and strong content would be good for our first assignment. If you’ve never read this story, you should. It’s a simply written story about a young girl who falls ill with Leukemia several years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Sounds like the perfect opportunity to think about the concepts of citizenship and government in the context of this book. Plus, we get to do some cool reader’s workshops and I can roll out the reader’s notebook and show them how we use it.

·         Writing- since we’ve started reading non-fiction, we’re going to take on biographies first in our writer’s workshops over the next two weeks. As you know, I signed my class and I up at edmodo.com to help streamline assignments & homework, increase student involvement, and make my life easier all while saving the environment. So within edmodo.com, I’ve signed my class up to start blogging with students in America to try to open up a dialogue about culture and global citizenship. I’m unbelievably excited about the possibilities that this can bring for the school year. Think penpals, but with all the modern conveniences of audio, video, and instantaneous communication. Anyway, the first finished writing piece will be an autobiography that will be shared with the overseas students. I’ll let you know how this all unfolds as the weeks pass.

·         Spelling/Vocab- Thankfully, this unit has an abundance of spelling and vocabulary words for upper primary students. We’re using www.quizlet.com this year for all of our spelling and vocab. If you haven’t seen this website, you ought to. It’s super simple to use (both for students and teachers) and it pretty much does everything for you. All you have to do is type in your weekly spelling list, choose (or type your own) definitions, and have your students login to study and play games. It even generates randomized tests with the kind of test questions you want! How cool is that?

·         Social Studies- Grades 5 & 6 are teaming up on a few projects this year for social studies and science so, for this theme, we’re having the students create their own country and draft a short constitution to be presented at the end of the unit. Since these are difficult concepts for kids, we began the lesson with a fun activity to demonstrate the value of having “laws” and had them create an online KWL chart to assess what they knew about citizenship and government. Some really great discussion questions came out of their KWL charts and now it gives me an idea of what I need to cover in my social studies lessons. Also, it helps me know what they are curious and want to know more about. Here are a few questions that came from my students this week:

  

    Pretty great, huh? Looks like I need to step up my game to get them the answers they’re looking forJ

·         Math- We’ll be looking at things like statistics, polling, budgets, and spending, but the possibilities to tie in math are virtually endless. My students will be conducting a school-wide survey about “public opinion” stuff and tallying their findings. Then, after they’ve collected their hard data, they’ll have to figure out how to best present their findings. I’m curious to see what they come up with.

·         Art- At least for week one, I’d like to tie in Japanese culture because it goes so well with our book and I love, love, love Japanese art. We’ll be watching a clip from the documentary Between the Folds and looking at the paper craft of origami. Because our book is about paper cranes and because they are the only origami thing I know how to make, that’s where we’ll start. There are a couple of origami books in the library and, if we get stuck, there’s always youtube.

Well folks, there you have it. That’s the best reader’s digest version I can give you about our school’s approach to thematic teaching. I hope it helped. Have a great week!