Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Quilting with Harriet Tubman

You know those moments when you do a project with your students, and it turns it out SO cute!? I totally had one of those moments yesterday! We've been learning about the life of Harriet Tubman for the last couple of weeks. As our final activity, we made a quilt of her life. We had a sheet of facts about her life (I'm sorry I don't have it to share, but it's just basic facts from the span of her life. I think it would be easy to recreate). Each child chose a fact and illustrated it. We had 12 facts and 23 kids, so most facts were used twice. Then we taped them together to make our quilt. Here's the finished project:
I think the reason I'm so proud is because of the details my students used in their picture (which has been an issue this year). We went through each fact and talked about how we could illustrate it. Initially, my students kept saying "draw her helping people" and I had to keep asking "What does that mean???? What am I going to draw to show that she's helping people?" Finally, they started getting more specific. Planning their illustrations really helped them in the details department. Here's an example...the student said "She was hiding behind a tree from the people looking for her."


This one is a little gory...ironically it was made by my sweetest child. She told me Harriet got hit in the head, and she even drew the blood! Maybe this is TOO much detail...

Of course, some students still wanted to draw a train for the Underground Railroad. Oh well. You take the good, you take the bad...   =)

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Blogs are awesome!!!!! Every weekend, I find myself surfing through teacher blogs to get ideas to use in my classroom. These are blogs by incredible teachers who know what it's like "in the trenches." I started my own blog (with the help of my bestie, Melissa from http://dontlettheteacher.blogspot.com/) so that I could give back to the teaching community. Unfortunately, I'm not one of those cutsie cutsie teachers, but I hope I can share some good ideas  =)

Today's idea: This week will be my first week using www.spellingcity.com in my classroom. For those who don't know, this is a website where teachers can input their spelling lists and students can play games and take practice tests to study their words. I've used it in previous years, but I had no idea that parents could get to it from home until at teacher at my school recently clued me in. You better believe I've typed up an announcement to go home with students tomorrow sharing the great spelling news!