Recycled Book Projects

Recently I attended a recycled book project event at a public library near me. Using pages from old books we made envelopes, beads, pencil covers, bookmarks, pennants, and collages. Since the first grade students at my school were busy studying recycling I thought it would be an excellent project to share with them. I prepped the paper from the old books by slicing through the pages at the binding with a sharp blade cutter. Then I used a paper cutter to chop the paper to the sizes I needed. The students came in for an hour and worked at "stations" around the room to create their projects. I think the triangle banners were my favorite. I kept one for my hedgehog, Hedgie.

Writing Great Captions

This week I used Nearpod to share an activity with students on how to write a good caption for a photo. We looked at some National Geographic photos and read the captions and talked about what made them interesting and what we learned from the picture.

Then I shared photos from the National Geographic Photo of the Day and asked the students to write their own captions. They did a great job and some of the students took creative license with the titles, which is just what I was hoping they would do.

Try it yourself- go the Rice Terrace Picture -- China Photo -- National Geographic Photo of the Day and look at this exquisite photo. How would you title this picture? What does the caption teach us? What are you still wondering?

I think I would call it Field of Dreams. I learned that this rice growing area has been farmed for generations. I wonder if it is all done by hand still or if there are any mechanical tools used.

Using the Visual Poetry App

This is one of my new favorite activities, the possibilities are endless. The examples below are from Kindergarten. They had so much fun taking pictures of Beanie Babies and writing with descriptive words. They even used the drawing tool to mask out their text area.