Activity Ideas to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing!
There are so many ways to teach students about the different aspects of community. Write a story about who your school is named after, make up a dance, research a community in a different country, make a promotional video for your city, build a model of a landmark in your town. Pretty much anything goes! But here are a few ideas you can use as-is or change up.
We can’t wait to see what you do and create!
(Remember, we’re offering free access to Cantata Learning books and songs through Capstone Interactive and additional books to support your project through PebbleGo until November 30, 2016. Sign up now to start using Capstone Interactive & PebbleGo.)
1. How I Help My Community
Have students write about an activity or way in which they have helped someone in their community. Students can add drawings, videos and more to illustrate their stories.
Within this digital tool and app, students can create a page or story bringing in original artwork/illustrations, images, photographs, text, voice, song, and other interactive features to make their story come to life. Once the Buncees are complete, they can be shared through email, social media and, of course, in person with classmates, teachers and families at home.
Check out this Give a Shout Out to Your Community Buncee made by our friends at Buncee!
2. Meet Someone Special
Have students interview someone in their communities. Try to get students to talk to someone other than a parent or grandparent. Provide students with questions to ask the interviewees about their roles in the community. Have students video the interviews or simply take notes.
Students can then create collages that introduce others to the people they interviewed. The collages could be paper-based or created using a variety of digital tools and apps. A couple digital tools and apps that would be wonderful to use with this project are Canva and FlipGrid.
With Canva, students can select from different templates. It would be fun to select poster, infographic, flyer, brochure and other templates.
When using FlipGrid, students can add questions they want to ask people in their neighborhood. They will share the link to the FlipGrid to get them to share their responses within individual videos. The FlipGrid can then be viewed by a class or individual students. They can share this with family too.
3. A Community I’m Curious About
Have students research another town, state or country that they are interested in. Have students create presentations with interesting facts about the communities they researched.
They can use Google Slides to create their presentation. This can be done individually, with a small group, or with the whole class. Once the slides are created, upload them as a PDF into FlipSnack. This will make a beautiful flippable eBook.
Students can also use Smore to create their presentation digitally in a poster or newsletter format.
