Displays

As mentioned in a previous post we are lucky enough to have a room dedicated to the teaching of the Myst unit. There are 6 display boards in the room of which we are making good use.

One of the boards is for Myst Island, four others are for the Ages; Stoneship, Spaceship, Mechanic and Channelwood. The final board will be to display a printed version of our interactive Wiki story.

                    Myst Island                                               The Mechanical Age                                 The Spaceship Age

              The Channelwood Age

Myst – giant map, key words, Wordle doc, art, descriptions

Mechanical – large rotating map, compass points, art

Spaceship – Compass, poems, art key words

Channelwood – This one was interesting because the students decided they wanted to create word walls that looked like the trees in the Channelwood Age. They worked in pairs cutting out the trunks and decorating them to look like bark and then they compiled a list of descriptive words and phrases. This document was then copied into Wordle and the students played with the format until they had something they were happy with and believed fit with the Age.

The students then analysed these Wordle documents and pulled out the words they thought had to be in there, words they could remove and words they could replace with the use of a thesaurus and Visuwords.

The image on the right shows the least successful of these word walls – it is well done and well thought out but the spelling leaves a little to be desired and the choice of words is limited. This group got distracted by the imagery of Wordle and did not use it to thoroughly analyse their words as was the intention.

(NB: ‘Myst’ and ‘mist’ is something my guys have frequently confused and been corrected on – memory retention in this low-level group is certainly interesting)

 I love having displays of the students work up in my rooms – it really lets them feel a sense of achievement that something they have created is deemed good enough to end up on the wall. I often start the year with a very bland room and let the students work bring the colour and life.

Having the Myst Room has proven beneficial in the sense that all the work for Myst is contained in this one area and when the students enter that room they are surrounded it. This helps them to get into the correct mindset and to concentrate.

A negative aspect of having the Myst room is that for the majority of the day the students favourite work is tucked away in a dark room (and it really is proving to be the students favourite work)

A few close-ups

 The good-old acrostic (not a fan but a good ext. act.)

 

 

The piece on the right is from my weakest student – I think this is great – the imagery he creates really fits with what he was trying to describe.

And of course, every boy in Grade 5 loves drawing spaceships – well this was drawn by a girl, at home. Her Mum ”aged’ it a brought it in to ‘see what all the fuss was about’