3rd Grade Hallway Displays Connected with Serious Learning

My hallway displays are often very minimal but right now I have a few cute displays that I would like to share with you. The reason I generally don't have great hallway displays is that I refuse to do "cute" for "cute's sake". Every assignment in my classroom connects to a math or literacy skill. These assignments just happen to allow students to create "cute" products while they are working on real skills. 

My class has been working on text to self connections. The students made connections with this week's story The Frog Princess using my Reading Strategies Response Posters. The students loved getting to decorate the posters in any way they chose and I loved getting them to write good, solid text to self connections.

Understanding the inverse relationship of multiplication and division is an important concept for my students to understand. I usually teach this concept through fact families, stressing to students that in a fact family only the numbers who "live" in the house can be a part of the related multiplication and division sentences. These houses help students with this concept, because the only number tiles they are provided to make the house are those of the "relatives". These houses are a part of my Fact Family Interactive Notebook Pages.

My students' Mystery Book Reports created a great wall display that was very individualized. Each student read a different mystery and had a different choice on how to present their comprehension. The book reports in the picture are "haunted house posters", comic book summaries and a diorama.

What is in your hallway display right now?

ISM Spotlight – Santa’s Workshop: Winter Craft Rotation

This year I am the luckiest teacher in the world. I get to teach at the best school ever – International School of Morocco, with some of the best, most creative, teachers ever. Each time I walk into someone else’s classroom, I get inspired and we just seem to spiral great teaching ideas off of each other. It’s a wonderful place to teach, and since we are all collaborating, it’s a wonderful place for our kids to learn – a teacher’s dream, right? I have tried and tried to convince the other teachers to create blogs of their own to spotlight and share some of their amazing ideas, but everyone is super busy. Instead, they have each agreed to let me spotlight some of their ideas right here on Raki’s Rad Resources. So, each Friday night, I will be posting an ISM Spotlight.

To celebrate the last week before the Winter Holidays, we did a whole school winter craft rotation called Santa’s Workshop.  We already teach in multiage groups, but for today we further grouped the children into multiage “family groups” of nine students, with each group having children from age 3 to 11.  These groups allowed older students to work with younger students, building leadership skills.  It also gave each group a break from their normal classmates, as they are all ready for a break from each other.

Each teacher hosted a craft, and the family groups moved from one room to another creating winter crafts.  Here are the crafts we offered:

1.  Orange and Clove Pomanders: In Ms. Kadiri’s room, students listened to the story of the Christmas Orange and then made orange and clove pomanders by making small holes in an orange and adding cloves in a multitude of designs.

2.  Toilet Paper Tube Reindeer and Snowmen:  In Ms. Tolentino’s room, students used toilet paper tubes to make snowmen and reindeers.  Ms. Tolentino had all of the pieces pre-cut and the students assembled and added details to these adorable decorations.

3.  Gingerbread Baby Puppet Show Videos:  In Ms. Nassar’s room, students listened to the story of The Gingerbread Baby, and then created props and scenery to film a reenactment the story on the iPad, in person or with puppets.  The results were adorable and all students were able to participate, whether with creation materials, filming, or being the star.

4.  Winter Collages:  In Ms. Johnson’s room, students created collaborative collages using a combination of magazines and student created snowflakes.  Each groups’ collage turned out very different from the others and all are now hanging in the hallway, where students can share their collaborative pride in their achievement. 

5.  Snow Globe & Word Snowflake Cards: In my room, we listened to Walking in a Winter Wonderland, created Winter Wonderland cards.  Each card included: a word cloud in the shape of a snowflake that we created on Tagxedo with a student generated list of words about winter and a paper snow globe show the student’s image of what would be in their Winter Wonderland

6.  Pinecone Ornaments: In Mr. Raki and Madame Gaille’s room, students used paint and beads to create ornaments out of pinecones.  They placed their pinecones in yogurt cups to hold them steady while they were painting.

What winter crafts did you work on this year?

Art Gallery App Brings African Masks to Life in My Classroom

My class has just finished up our unit on the continent of Africa.  For part of our final project, my kids created an African style mask.
We started by viewing real African masks by using the Collections App.  This is a free app that allows you to view artwork from all over the world.

Then, we designed our own masks, using recycled items from our schools collection of “stuff”.  The kids each chose a box (the shoe boxes worked best) and used masking tape to attach their selected pieces.

Next, we paper machied our mask frames and let them dry.

Finally, we painted our masks and added string and feathers for details.



Tomorrow, we will be reviewing each other’s masks with this simple critiquing rubric – grab your free copy from Google Docs.

Download the step by step directions for this project from my Teachers Pay Teachers store.  Also available at my store are the Glogster Project my class completed and the Power Point presentation we used to take notes on each region of Africa. 

ISM Spotlight–Making Eric Carle letters

This year I am the luckiest teacher in the world.  I get to teach at the best school ever – International School of Morocco, with some of the best, most creative, teachers ever.  Each time I walk into someone else’s classroom, I get inspired and we just seem to spiral great teaching ideas off of each other.  It’s a wonderful place to teach, and since we are all collaborating, it’s a wonderful place for our kids to learn – a teacher’s dream, right?  I have tried and tried to convince the other teachers to create blogs of their own to spotlight and share some of their amazing ideas, but everyone is super busy.  Instead, they have each agreed to let me spotlight some of their ideas right here on Raki’s Rad Resources.  So, each Friday night, I will be posting an ISM Spotlight. 

This week, we are spotlighting Jen Kadiri, our Pre-K teacher.  Jen teaches the 3 year old class, and does the most amazingly cute, hands-on art projects.  I don’t know how she got brave enough to use paint, collage, and glitter with three year olds, but the results are amazing and the topics she covers amaze me regularly.

Pre-K has been working on recognizing colors and the letters in their first name.  Ms. Kadiri read Eric Carle’s book Brown Bear Brown Bear to the students, and then they created Eric Carle letters for the first letters of their name and the letters of our school – ISM.  She says that she was inspired by a blog post at the Imagination Tree, which she found on Pinterest.  Here’s what they did:

1.)  They painted on tissue paper with paintbrushes, bristle blocks, legos and their fingers.  (Finger painting with 3 year olds – I told you she’s brave!)  After the paper dried, the kids cut the paper into small “collage size” pieces. 

 

2.)  Ms. Kadiri created cutouts of the letters in the students names, and the letters that represent our school – ISM.

 

3.)  The kids glued their collage size pieces all over their letters.

4.)  Ms. Kadiri went back and trimmed off the excess of the tissue paper to great easy to read letters.

 

5.)  The kids spent a lot of time identifying which letters belong to which kids, and then coming up with other words that also had those letters in them.  For example, Robert’s R could also stand for the pet rabbits that the students visit during recess.

 

Update:  Mrs. Kadiri’s class had a lot of extra paper left over, so Mrs. Kadiri turned it into a sorting exercise.  The students sorted all of the paper into color piles.  Then, Mrs. Kadiri drew out the Rooster from   Rooster’s Off to See the World, which they had just read.  With the students telling her what colors they saw in the rooster on the cover, she shaded the right colors into the drawing.  The kids then matched their carefully sorted piles onto the drawing.  Here’s their finished product, it’s quite amazing!

 

Come back next Friday to find out what the other ISM teachers are up to.