Angela Maiers, an educator/consultant/writer whom I greatly admire, has mentioned on her blog the idea of having a “Dream Team” – a group of people who you would like to emulate. In her book, The New Habitudes, she also mentions this, and offers a free reproducible here for conjuring up your personal Dream Team members.
I loved this idea, and mentioned it to my 5th graders, who also seemed excited about the concept. Then I thought of a way they could present their Dream Teams to the class using their current favorite technology tool – the iPad.
The students chose 4 character traits that they believe to be the most important, and then 4 people from history who exhibited those traits. After researching some specifics, they developed “Dream Team Talk Show Scripts” to use with the full version of Puppet Pals. The full version has a cast of talk show characters, and also allows you to create your own puppets from photos. (Puppet Pals 2 is even better – but we haven’t been able to upgrade yet!)
Here are the planning sheets we used:
Design Your Dream Team Talk Show Script
The entire class is not finished yet, as the students need to rotate through our iPads, but you can see some of them on our class blog by clicking here.
