Wampanoag and Pilgrim Life

After a lesson comparing Pilgrim life almost 400 years ago with our lives today, I wanted to add on to that knowledge with a comparison between Wampanoag and Pilgrim life. I pulled together images of things like Pilgrim houses, clothes, cooking methods, etc and the same for Wampanoag houses and such. Then, we folded a paper and drew pictures to represent each side of life. I got all of the images from Creative Commons. Here are just a couple of the images I used to show them what life looked like:

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On a side note, Creative Commons is a great source for images. If you search this way, most images that come up have granted permission to use them. Some have certain restrictions such as attribution, share alike, or not for commercial use, so make sure you check for that and make sure what you are using it for fits in those parameters. I use it all the time to jazz up my SMART notebooks and to show students images that add to what we are learning, and it is a great source for images for student projects also.

But back to this lesson, here are some of the end results from the Kindergarteners.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Postcard Maker

I found this postcard maker today and thought about using it to write a postcard from one character to another, to show non-fiction information, or to write as a fictional or actual person in a historical period. Here is a sample I made. 

 

The postcard maker includes space for the usual mailing address, greeting, body of the message, and closing, but I liked that it also included space to add at the top a title and description along with a citation for a picture on the front of the postcard. This is a great mini-lesson opportunity to have kids cite an image, to talk about describing an image, choosing a picture that fits the assignment, or just adding some authenticity. Give it a whirl - it is very easy and quick!

Glass Giant Customized Pictures

I was working on a SMART notebook about Big 6 today and rediscovered a site I found a while back. Glass Giant has several fun ways to take a few words and make some custom pictures with them. There are rockets, cookies, dog tags, tickets, chalkboards, animated lightening, and more. It is a fun way to add some punch to a presentation. Here are some of the examples I came up with playing around with my Big 6 presentation. 

How else could you use Glass Giant pictures?

Tesselations in Nature

A few weeks ago I talked about a tesselation project I was planning with a 4th grade class. They finished it yesterday! This was a good, quick project and a good way to evaluate their understanding of a math concept in writing. Students were each assigned a type of tesselation found in nature, then the cropped in on it and explained why (or why not) it was made of polygons. They were to use math vocabulary and be clear in their explanation that they understood the concept. We spent about 15 minutes on one day reviewing sites to find pictures on such as Creative Commons and Edupic so that we can use the pictures, and one day for about an hour making the powerpoints. So in a very short time, we had a good use of copyright friendly images, math review and assessment, writing using information to support your case, using picture toolbar tools in powerpoint to crop the picture, and they are going to share them as a class to guess what they are. That covered a lot in a short project! To add on in future projects, I would maybe also have them research the topics a little too, but we wanted short and sweet to focus on math this time. Here are some of their end results.

Edited to add: I created a Livebinder of my sources or  you can see it below.

Tessellations

Tessellated

When the fourth grade AG teacher told me she wanted to do a project on tessellations, I admit, I had to get a slight review to be sure I was talking about what I thought I was talking about.

tes·sel·lat·ed   /ˈtɛsəˌleɪtɪd/ Show Spelled[tes-uh-ley-tid]
adjective

1. of, pertaining to, or like a mosaic.
2. arranged in or having the appearance of a mosaic; checkered.

She wants the kids to do something on tessellations in nature. My first thought was this:


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What was your first thought? After that I was stuck, but slowly starting thinking of things like:

   





   

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I still needed some other ideas so I turned to the internet. (Now I would probably turn to Twitter, but that is a post for another day! I am @nclibrarygal if you want to follow me.) I came across this site that gave me the rest of the ideas I needed. It even gave me some inspiration that I will get to in a second. Our project that we eventually settled on would be to crop in on a picture of a tessellation in nature, and have the students argue whether or not the shape is a polygon. Then on the next slide, show the whole picture along with information (and citations of course!). This was a great way to bring math, science, evaluation, and information skills together in one big bang. I don't expect it will take too long either. We are planning it for the end of February so I will post some examples of the final project when we get there.

Now, the inspiration the site gave me. You can take pictures of tessellations and submit them. Why not have students do a digital photo scavenger hunt and see what they can find on their own to submit?

What tessellations can you think of? Any other ideas on how to create a project around them?