At the end of the year, one of our big projects is to create an end of the year scrapbook. I've done this in a variety of ways and still haven't found a way that really makes me happy. That said, the end result makes me happy every year.
This year I put pictures into individual Pixie files. The kids could open one, save it with their name at the end of the file, and then get to work writing about the picture. Over a few days, my sixteen kiddos captioned 88 pictures!
Sometimes I looked at their work, felt it was a strong, thoughtful effort, and moved on. Other times I conferenced with kids about it. Maybe I thought it was too brief, maybe it had errors that they were able to fix (lack of upper case letters, lack of punctuation, misspelled high frequency words), or maybe it didn't make sense.
I've posted all of their work on our class blog and they'll all get physical copies (two pictures per side so 22 pages per kiddo in black and white). But I decided I want to share them here too. So, here are the first eight!
One of the things I love about this project is seeing how they view our year. I get a sense of what they valued and what stood out to them. There are lots of captions about writing (something I would have said got short shrift this year). That makes me happy.
This is my most literal little friend. I am not surprised to find that he wrote exactly what he is doing in this picture. I do love that he likes to work with his friends!
See? These are just the first eight pictures they did. It was random but half of them are about writing. The first one, at the top, I'm not even convinced was a time we were writing!
It also makes my day to see how many times these darlings wrote about their thinking. I am so thrilled to see they are aware of the thinking they are doing.
I also love all the joy in these captions. It is so reassuring to get the sense that they have enjoyed our year together.
Cross-posted from jenorr.com.
