You’ve spent months building a learning community, pre-assessing, teaching, formative assessing, re-teaching, and wrapped the semester with a cumulative semester exam. So, what did your students leave your classroom with to bridge them through to the holidays?
When I was in the classroom, I always liked to send students out with two things:
- A gift for somebody else that was a piece of themselves
- Encouragement to continue learning by interacting with others
You know those writing genres that you studied this semester in your ELA classroom? Why not ask students to use that as a springboard for a gift of writing to share with somebody else? My students were encouraged to be creative and come up with a unique gift that only cost them some thinking time and a bit of writing. Here are some examples of what my students crafted:
- Recipe for a Great Mom, Dad, Sister, Grandma, Grandpa, etc.
- I Am From poem describing family, home, gift, pet, etc.
- Word Cloud of adjectives/adverbs which describe family, home, person, etc.
- Lab Report for the creation of a favorite holiday treat (cooking from a science perspective instead of a recipe)
- Personal narrative describing family gathering from pet’s, house’s, car’s, etc. perspective
- How-To for the perfect gift, parent, grandparent, etc.
- List poem such as Knoxville, Tennessee by Nikki Giovanni
I would model how I created a gift using one of the examples above and have it focused on my Granny, sister, parent, or grandchild. Then, I just provided encouragement, a sounding board, and time for them to create. Often, I would find that my students would get going and create a written testament for several family members!
Students were also encouraged to step outside their comfort zone and interact with folks with whom they might not normally converse. I mentioned that we would be performing research and would also have an opportunity to perform personal interviews after the holiday break. So, we would look at some examples and I also would share some Story Corps broadcasts as examples – I usually would choose those which were both audio/video and had the script to read. Story Corps provides a wonderful bank of questions from which students can draw to be the basis of their interview or to get some conversations going with a family member who isn’t so familiar to them.
So, instead of ending your time with your students embroiled in a test, why not send them off with a bit of creativity and some questions to learn more?