Class Displays

These are a few of the displays I've had up in my class this year:

This is our scrapbook approach to showing the process of building our volcanoes.

I wrote a previous post on making songs using the water-in-the-jar trick. This is part of our display showing our colour songs.

We used a recordable photo album to record the children playing their songs, and include a photo of them playing their song.

"Banana" by Ed Vere is a firm favourite picture book in our class. The kids love it because they can "read" it. There are only two words in the whole book: "banana" and "please." It's a great book for teaching children about looking at the pictures for clues to infer what is happening in the story. We looked at things like colour, line, and facial expression to figure out how the monkey in the story was feeling when he didn't have a banana. We say "banana," we cry "banana," we SCREAM "BANANA!" It's great fun. As a result of all the interest, some of the children decided to paint the monkeys from the story.

As I've mentioned before, my kids love to paint, and we always look for new ways to use the medium to create. The process is so much more important than the end product sometimes. In this display, you can see some of the children's paintings they made using cooked spaghetti. Often, I put up a wee sign to explain what we did. I also pop up photos of the children doing the activity. That way, parents can see what they've been up to, and kids love to look for themselves on the wall.



What have you put up on your classroom walls?

Group Task Management

In my short time as a teacher, I've heard pros and cons to using Group Work as a teaching tool. Some people think it's the lazy teacher's way to get through the day, some people believe it's a way to get pupils to take charge of their own learning. If you have self-motivated pupils, then group tasks can be beneficial, but I don't think group work should be avoided just because some pupils need a little more motivation and guidance.

I'm sure I'm not the only teacher who's learned the hard way that dividing pupils into groups to accomplish a task requires more management and thought than you'd think. With no guidance, pupils fight over who will do what, or won't actually accomplish anything because no one has really taken charge or taken initiative. As a teacher, you really have to guide pupils with everything from who will collect resources for their group, to who will physically write down information. To be fair, some pupils just click and get on with it; but there are some who really need your guidance in order to accomplish the task you've set them.

Often when I divide my kids up to work in groups, I assign them roles so everyone is clear on what they need to contribute to their group. I've carried this out in several ways in the past: I've popped wee post-its on certain pupils to indicate who's the Scribe/Author, I've written the titles of each role on slips of paper and handed them out randomly, or I've allowed the children to decide who will be what. What I find to be the best method to carry out assigning roles is having these cards to use and re-use:

I created this set myself, including the illustrations. I've printed, cut out and laminated a few sets of these cards (so you can hand them out to several groups) so I can just keep reusing them. The children quickly learn what group roles are and what their responsibilities are, but I find the cards to be a good reminder. On the back of each card, the role title is written at the top with some reminders of what they should do:

I made up a separate page of the job descriptions and glued them to the back of the picture cards before I laminated them. Easy peasy.

I explained the group roles to the children as their Job Titles. For instance, my job title is "Teacher." The Job Titles, or Roles, that I use are:

1. Manager
2. Illustrator
3. Reader
4. Author
5. Resource Manager
6. Reporter

I don't necessarily use every role for every group task, and not every person in the group gets a role all the time because it may not be necessary for the task. Or sometimes, I have fewer than 6 pupils in a group, but there is a need for all the roles, so some pupils may get TWO job titles! I would slowly introduce these roles to younger pupils, but I've managed to be able to use them for as young as Primary 2 (Grade 1).

Let me know if you find this method of Group Task Management helpful in your classroom!

...and on that farm he had some chicks

All in all, the experience with the hatching chicks was very successful. The children painted pictures of chicks, we read books about how they grow and what they need to survive; the children were so excited to see them and how they changed so quickly. By the time we sent them to a farm, they were already beginning to grow their feathers under their wings! I would highly recommend doing this project with your class or school. It was such a rich topic, and the children are still talking about it a few weeks on.