Eileen Hernon
Language Arts
This document is a graphic organizer I had my third-grade students complete while they listened to the story Two Bad Ants. This lesson was a part of a larger project-based unit on perspective. The graphic organizer held the students accountable for listening to the story as well as guided their thinking about how ants' and humans' perspectives differ. After I was done reading, the students had their choice of activities: they could either draw the playground from a bird's perspective, or they could write a story about ants who come to visit our classroom. As I said on my teaching and learning philosophy page, I believe that students put forth higher-quality work when they are given choices. My students were all engaged in this task, and as a result they were better prepared to continue their broader investigation of perspective in art and literature. When I am a teacher, I hope to develop project-based learning opportunities that explore an abstract concept through various works of literature and writing tasks.
Below are pictures taken of a student's language arts notebook. My students didn't have a lot of time each day for social studies, so I integrated it into language arts whenever possible. That way, my kids were still practicing valuable literacy skills while also refreshing their social studies knowledge. In 2017, I attended a reading conference that focused specifically on creatively incorporating content into language arts and vice versa. I plan to try out even more of those ideas once I have my own classroom.
The slideshow to the right showcases my third graders' final writing pieces for our project-based unit on perspective. After we took a field trip to an art museum, the students had to pick one work of art to write a poem or short story about. I guided the students through all aspects of the writing process, and used mentor texts to introduce roughly half of the students to poetry writing, something they had never done before. After their pieces were complete, each student made their own artistic creation based on a classmate's writing. I was so proud of how hard my students worked during this project. It has definitely inspired me to include project-based learning into my future teaching practice.
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Click on the photos to see them in greater detail