Reflecting in Creative Ways

Today was an amazing day in Mrs. Iwanski's classroom. The reason it was so incredible is that we wrapped up the third quarter and officially became 4th quarter 5th graders. With so many things in our not so distant future (Spring break, MAPS testing, an entire quarter of learning left) prior to us getting to summer vacation, it is important that we took a moment to reflect on how far we have come and the goals we have going forward.

At the end of first quarter we did a reflection called "Superhero Students." Each student had their picture taken lying on the floor of the classroom on a piece of sky colored paper. They then used the options on google drawing to create capes with their super strengths, and word bubbles with what academic villain they wanted to defeat in the second quarter. The final product looked something like this...

We worked hard to achieve those goals in the second quarter and kept our superhero pictures in the window to remind us what we were working towards. At the end of second quarter it was once again time to put together reflections on how we had progressed. This time we used Dave Burgess' Teach Like a Pirate book as an inspiration. Instead of teaching like a pirate, my students were asked to reflect on how they learned like a pirate. I once again took their pictures as pirates, put them up in the window and added word bubbles of their reflections. The directions for this activity can be found here. Here is an example of the final product...

Now we have reached the end of the third quarter and once again it is time to reflect on our experiences. I decided on a theme of "Dive Into 4th Quarter" We started by writing paragraph reflections on how the quarter went, and thinking about goals for the final quarter of the school year. We then copied the text into tagxedo, and edited the product to appear as a sea creature. We took those sea creatures and put them into Google Drawings, cropped where needed (great new feature in Google Drawings) and will get them printed to help adorn our window and remind us of our goals. The directions can be found on this website. Here are a few samples of final products.