Fabulous in Fourth Grade: Read All About It!

So, I decided I would procrastinate putting grades in the computer by posting some of my favorite reading projects that were presented today. I just finished a unit with my Reading class based off of the book Number the Stars. This was a childhood favorite of mine, so I was very excited when I decided to do that book with my class. The students, even though they have no background knowledge (or very little) with World War 2 and the Holocaust, they still were incredibly engaged during the entire book. This also opened up their world to those subjects and they couldn't wait to go to the library every week and check out more books about this period in history. That is when, as a teacher, you know you are doing your job. Their final assessment for this novel study was a partner project, as well as two individual projects. For their partner projects, they had to choose one out of five options. I wanted to highlight these two because I thought they really showed the student's understanding of the novel, as well as their creativity.

So this first series of pictures are of a pair of girls who created a facebook page. I thought they really took this to the next level. They created this from memory....we have no access to facebook at school! Next time, I would love to figure out a way for them to create a mock facebook page for their character on the computer. I love all the details that are true to facebook!

Chatting with Ellen :)

This next series of pictures are of the newspaper option. They could create an illegal newspaper (similar to the one in the book) or they could create a legal newspaper. This pair of boys chose to create an illegal newspaper. I especially liked the tag line under the title: "The illegal newspaper you can trust."