My daughter is a huge fan of the BBC’s Sherlock Holmes series so when I saw this, I had to show her. We both had a chuckle over the graph of his interests 🙂
a portion of Sherlock Holmes’ resume from Media Bistro
You can see the infographic in its entirety by visiting Media Bistro. It’s being used to advertise for a new book on infographic resumes from McGraw-Hill.
Students could do a similar activity to analyze a character in any book or a person in history. This would go along very well as a companion activity to creating a book trailer using the app I mentioned yesterday, “In a World… Drama.” To create the infographic, students could design their own free-hand. Or, you can visit this list of suggested websites to make infographics from Richard Byrne.
This activity not only allows students to show their understanding of a particular person while showcasing their creativity, but may also help them to develop a beneficial skill that they may need down the road. My husband’s company has been receiving infographic resumes from prospective employees, and they definitely help the job applicants to stand out from the rest of the crowd! (Of course, you probably would not want to highlight cigars as being your primary interest in life…)
This summer, some other GT teachers and I got together to host some free online classes through Edmodo for our 3rd-5th graders. My class is called, “Make a Theme Park.” Each week, the students are invited to make something for a theme park that they have imagined. Last week, the challenge was to build a model of a theme park ride. With a great introduction video from the awesome Joey Hudy, our “celebrity judge” for the week, and some links I provided, the students were assigned to create projects that were: fun, creative, and had at least one moving part. Their videos and/or pictures of their inventions were posted by Thursday evening on Padlets that I created for the purpose. On Friday, Joey Hudy announced the winners. He admitted, and I completely agree, that choosing the winners was extremely difficult! I was blown away by the intricacies of each one, and it was really fun to see how different they were. Each week we have two categories – one for the family to enter together, or one that the individual student can enter. Here are the winners:
Family Theme Park Ride – “The Sparking Spur” – I don’t have a good image of this one, as only video was provided. However, as you may or may not know, we live in San Antonio – home of the 2014 World Champion Spurs basketball team. This ride celebrates our awesome team and city by starting at the AT&T Center, going past the Tower of the Americas and the Alamo, and ending at the River Walk.
Individual Theme Park Ride – “Kittyana Jones”
Move the lever up, and the yarn boulder pushes the cart off the ledge and into the box of rubber band snakes!
I want to give shout outs to the other amazing entries:
The BGW (Bubble Gum Water Blaster) – Ride down a slide as you are pelted by water balloons and splash into a pool.
The All-Star – Spun by a K’nex motor, this ride offers you a basketball hoop to sit in and features Larry Bird and Michael Jordan.
Turning Tail Over Scale – I wish I could show you a picture of this one, but all I have is video and the screen shots are blurry. This innovative inventor used a pencil sharpener to turn her ferris wheel!
Dolphin Ferris Wheel
Best Way to Hogwarts
If you are interested in the idea of getting your students more involved with making, here are some other resources for you:
Scan with the Aurasma app to see a video explanation. (You must be following the Hidden Forest Elementary channel.)
Several years ago, I got a fabulous idea from a book called What’s On Your Mind? by Joel Anderson and Joan Brinkman. One of the lessons recommends that gifted students create an “Eight Trait Floor Plan.” The students are asked to think metaphorically about what a blueprint of their attributes might look like. Which “rooms” would be the largest? How many doors would each room have – and where would they lead? The book gives many excellent questions to help students visualize this “House of Traits.”
I’ve used variations of this lesson with my GT 5th graders over the years. Sometimes the students created the floorplans in MS Excel, sometimes on graph paper. Generally a description accompanied it, whether typed or written. It’s been so interesting to see the creative ways students visualize their own attributes – from hidden rooms to indoor pools to closets with no doors. The project is always insightful for me and for them. Last year, it was an excellent introduction to their Dream Team projects.
We were kind of cutting it close on time this year, so I gave the students graph paper instead of asking them to complete the floor plans on computers. I directed them to the Periodic Table of Character Strengths to choose their traits. Instead of adding paragraphs to the bottom that explained their floor plans, they were told they could use one of the creation apps on the iPad, such as: Tellagami, Puppet Pals, or ThingLink. I promised the students who created videos that we could add some “Aurasma-tazz” by linking them with the Aurasma app.
One of the projects is pictured at the top of this post. If you have the free Aurasma app, you can follow our channel (Hidden Forest Elementary), and view the Puppet Pals video that accompanies the floor plan by scanning the image above. Or, you can view the video that I’ve embedded below.
The advantage of using the Aurasma app is that my student can take this project home, and her parents don’t have to go to a website to look for her video explanation. All they have to do is scan the picture with Aurasma.
If you are not familiar with Aurasma, which is one of several augmented reality apps, here is a link to my page of Augmented Reality Resources. This page includes links to tutorials, as well as other activities.
See below for the link for the full set of Genius Hour villains.
Last summer, I was playing around with ways to spice up my Genius Hour time, and decided to add some of the elements of gamification to the mix. One of these was to create Challenge Cards. At the beginning of each Genius Hour, students have the option to choose a Challenge Card. The higher the level of the card, the more difficult the challenge is. If they complete the challenge successfully, the students earn that number of points in Class Dojo (we use the points to Level Up and earn privileges) – but if they don’t complete the challenge, they will lose the points. It’s been wildly successful with my 5th graders, and my 3rd and 4th graders are just about to join in on the fun.
One other gamification element I invented last summer happened to be a flyer that listed “Genius Hour Villains.” I mean, think about it – what good is a game without any villains to fight? So, I thought about some of the obstacles my students had faced in the past during Genius Hour, and tried to personify them. And that was when the “Genius Hour Villains” flyer was born.
I ran the Villains by my 5th graders when they started Genius Hour last Fall. They have been referring to them ever since – particularly “Decoy Boy.” When we reflect on Genius Hour, he seems to be the biggest culprit when it comes to the students making progress on their projects. However, just the fact that they can identify the problem has reduced its occurrence quite a bit, compared to the students who worked on Genius Hour last year with me.
4th grade just started their Genius Hour time last week. I brought out the flyer, and went over all of the “characters” they should avoid during their research time. They thought the characters were hysterical. Maybe it was a coincidence, but this was the smoothest “First” Genius Hour I ever experienced.
The kids embraced the villains so much, I thought that maybe a little flyer wasn’t enough. So, I went home this weekend and worked on a set of posters. I wanted to make “Wanted” posters, but then I realized that these guys are actually what we don’t want in the classroom. So, these are my (Not) Wanted posters.
“Fall Fun for Fast Finishers” is a free packet of 20 open-ended task cards from Rachel Lynette at Minds in Bloom. Her packet is available for free download from Teachers Pay Teachers. You do have to be a member in order to receive the download, but it is free to register.
I love one of the sample cards that Rachel displays in her blog post, which asks you to pretend you are Autumn (the season) and you are running for president against the other three seasons. What a creative idea!
On a side note, Teachers Pay Teachers can be a goldmine for lesson ideas. There are many, many free activities available. It is well worth registering.
UPDATE 11/28/2020: This link is no longer available. Sorry!
This is a neat Java-based site that allows you to design your own snowflake with text. Teachers could have their students create short messages in their snowflakes: a sentence from a book character’s point of view, what they would give the world as a gift, their favorite things about winter, etc…, and decorate the classroom bulletin boards with the print-outs. I found this link on KB Connected, where you can also find a link to over 100 holiday related websites.
