Day 32: Projects

I was thinking about the blog today and I realized that I haven't put up any projects that my students have worked on.  We have two that we recently finished and have displayed in the hallway, so I thought I'd share them with you (in case you want any ideas!).

The first project is a shape poem. About a week ago we finished our first reading theme.  At the end of each theme, there is a genre focus.  The focus for this particular theme was poetry.  We read poetry with rhyming patterns, without rhyming patterns, sensory poems, silly word poems, and shape poems.  The students really liked the idea of the shape poems, so we wrote some! 

I decided to combine two projects into one.  We used to write a sensory poem about our yearly fall field trip to a nearby nature center.  With budget cutbacks, we are allowed only one field trip this year, and that was the one cut.  So I had the children write sensory poems about fall.  (We used to write fall acrostics, but the acrostics are going to have to be done another time.)  Anyhoo, I had the children brainstorm some ideas about fall, keeping in mind that the shapes of the ideas would have to be recreated on the paper with words.  We came up with football, baseball, apples, leaves, Halloween candy, and pumpkins.  I had the children brainstorm sensory words for their chosen topics, then we turned those words into sentences.  After proofreading, I helped them create their shapes and we published the poems.  They really turned out pretty neat.  I took a picture of one of the more unusual ones--a football helmet.  There are also apples, taffy, a Kit Kat, several pumpkins, several jack-o-lanterns, a baseball, and a lollipop hanging.



This is the football helmet poem of one of my football fans.   Hope you can read it!

The other project goes along with the first story of our second theme, which is titled "Nature Walk."  The story we did the project on was Henry and Mudge and the Starry Night.  If you're not familiar with the story, it's about the experiences of a boy named Henry, his big drooly dog Mudge, and Henry's parents while they are on a camping trip.  I had the children pretend they were a character in the story; they could choose any one they wanted.  (A lot of them chose Mudge this year.  Go figure!)  Anyhow, they were to write a letter to a friend and tell that friend all about their camping trip as experienced through the character they chose.  After that, they were to include a "picture" of something they saw or did while camping. 

The projects came out pretty cute.  Some of the children drew the campsite, one drew a fish jumping out of the stream, several drew the log Mudge was chewing on, one drew the stars at night, and a few even drew the ham sandwich Mudge unpacked at the campsite.  I took a picture of one of the projects, but the photo was a little blurry.  I'll have to retake and post on Monday.

We have some other projects we'll be doing in the next few weeks; I'll try to post as we do them.  Until then, enjoy!