If you're not from the....

One of my favorite teaching books is "If you're not from the Prairie..." written by David Bouchard.  It has some amazing illustrations and David describes the prairies perfectly.  I read this to my Grade 2 class last year and we made our own "If you're not from the...." books.  In the social studies curriculum we studied Inuit, Prairie, Ukrainian, and our own culture.  As a class we made a book for each place we studied. I started with their hometown and used a simple template for the students to fill in (the one on the left I used for Iqaluit, when we studied Inuit culture).  They would pick one thing that was special about that place and write it in the blanks and then describe that thing using three or more descriptive sentences.

For example:  If you're not from Iqaluit, you don't know the inuksuks, you can't know the inuksuks.  The inuksuks are made from rocks and stone.  They can act as a landmark to help people find their way.  The inuksuk is the symbol on the Nunavut flag.   If you're not from Iqaluit, you don't know the inuksuks. 

I had the class type their final draft on the computer and as an art assignment we created the picture that goes along with their work.  Each time I used a different medium (water color pencils, water color paints, pencil crayons).  These turned out fantastic!  Then I put the book together and we read it as a class. Each student would smile from ear to ear when I would read their section of the book.

This is two of our book covers.  I just picked some of my students research images that they used for their art as decoration for the page.

This is the example we made as a class.  I demonstrated the use of water color pencils and paints in this Inuksuk. 

As a class we created this wordle (http://www.wordle.net/) with all of the things that are special about Iqaluit. 

A students example of the snow bunting.  I am so proud with how it turned out!

I am really happy with how this project turned out, and I am thinking about other ways of incorporating this idea into different subjects.

Thursday Quote #4:

Yes my mountain is waiting!!

The more time I am spent searching for quotes the more I find that I just LOVE Dr. Seuss.