I teach at a magnet school.  (if you are unsure about what a magnet is, here is some background ) Because of this, my classroom (as is the entire school) is filled with a great deal of diversity.  Many of my students are the sons or daughters of immigrants to the United States.  Some are immigrants themselves.  So when we came upon our unit discussing Heritage, they each had quite a bit to bring to the table.  During this unit, we did many different projects to get the students thinking about where they came from and their own family roots.   I thought I would take this post to share some of those projects with you. To begin, we talked about what an immigrant was in general.  The students wrote paragraphs about them after we read several articles on the subject.  Now, this was before Common Core so now I can see that we totally could have tied in the close reading idea and pulled in actual evidence from the articles, instead of the basic ......

One of my favorite units to teach (as you probably know because every.single.time I talk about it I shout that to the roof!  hee hee) is the American Revolution.  At the beginning of the unit, I ask my students to find artifacts that would represent the time period, and then write WHY they believe these artifacts are appropriate.  In doing this, the students are not only getting their brains focused on the American Revolution and what we are going to be studying, but also begin the process of critically thinking about objects, making inferences about them, and justifying their answers to others (just like they will on the state test....ahhh....always trying to make connections....) Anyway, I give the students this sheet .  They then set out to find things that really, truly help tell the tale of the Revolution and set the stage for our future learning. The students came up with a variety of different things.  Some of the objects were homemade......

I am big on "At Home" projects.  I like that the students have a chance to budget their own time (something critical for when they move on to middle school), that they get to work with their parents on a school related project, and that they will have a great project, made with materials they found at home, as an end product. Now I know there are some people who feel they can never grade something that a child did at home because they don't know how much input a parent had.  Well, I honestly have never had that problem.  My students are doing the work.  They have *help*, but I haven't received a project that was completed solely by a parent (or if I have, it has not be evident in the least ;) ) Anyway, that is not what this post is about.  Back to the subject.... Heritage is a unit that we teach through our reading series in 5th grade.  The unit is jampacked with stories of different people, where they come from, and how their culture influences who t......