Hexagonal Reflections

Update 5/10/2022: For more End-Of-Year Activities, visit this post.

One of the things I wanted to try this year was to ask my students to do hexagonal thinking as they reflected over what they had learned.  Since my 4th graders had already done some hexagonal thinking this year, I thought they might like to experiment with this activity.

First, they visited our class blog where I have been posting pictures from throughout the year.  I showed them how to filter the categories to find all of the blog posts from their class.  Then they chose pictures that were meaningful to them and saved them to their home drives.

After choosing 4-5 pictures, the students signed in to my account on Canva, and created their own blank “A4” projects.  Once the project opened, they were directed to use the search window to find a hexagon frame.  In Canva, frames have a cloud and blue sky in them.

What I like about frames is that you can drag pictures into them, and they will take the shape of the frame without overlapping.

After the students added a hexagon frame, they resized it and copied it so several could fit on one page.  Once their frames were arranged, they uploaded their pictures and set them in the frames.  Then they used text designs to explain the connections between pictures that shared sides.

You can see a couple of examples below.  They would probably make more sense if you had been in my class this year, but this gives you the general idea.

This went better than my last visual hexagon activity, but I think I will improve it next year by giving a few more guidelines for the “connector” texts so the students will try to find unique parallels that aren’t readily apparent.

For more ideas for end-of-the-year activities, here is a recent post I published.