Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Gifted Gab and the Classroom Corner--Group Story Writing

Today we began our economics unit, which is a favorite for me every year!  We had the most fun talking about needs vs wants.  It is hilarious hearing what 8 and 9 year olds classify as needs--for example, video games and Yoshi were both suggested as needs rather than wants... ;-)  After a bit of clarification from me about the task at hand, the students got the hang of it.  We generated a comprehensive list of ideas on our classroom SMARTboard.


Then we read 2 books by Laura Numeroff--If You Give a Pig a Pancake and If You Take a Mouse to the Movies.  Both of these books served as great accompaniments to our classroom discussion.


We then worked as a class to write our own class book, If You Give a FOCUS Student a Box of Crayons!  Pictured below is our classroom brainstorming session.  The students were literally bursting with ideas, as you can see by our ideas and notes!


After we composed our completed story, students volunteered to illustrate various pages of our book.  I retyped the text of our story on my teacher workstation, and students glued the corresponding sentences to their completed pictures.



We laminated each picture, along with our cover, and now we can't wait to share our story with other classes!  Not only was this a great intro to our economics unit, but it also encouraged students to use language arts skills, creative thinking, group problem solving, and logical reasoning!



If you are interested in seeing more of my classroom economics and advertisting unit, just follow the links below.  Shannon :-)






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