Who Am I Project

We just had our spring parent/teacher conferences and I always like to put something in the hallway to keep waiting parents busy. One of my favorite things is some sort of guessing game with their child. When I taught kindergarten, we did a shape glyph that was a fun guessing game for parents, too. This year, I decided to do a "Who Am I?" project. They turned out super cute. 

I chose to do the writing fairly guided this time by giving them the sentence starters. You could do it however, but this worked well for what I was wanting. A few ideas for clues: 

- My favorite subject is...

- I like to play...

- My favorite food is...

- I am good at...

- My favorite color(s) is/are...

- When I grow up, I want to be...

Here's the "Who Am I?" writing paper I used. 

After completing the writing, we had to get our profiles ready. I'll be honest, it was a little bit of a process to get the profiles, but for me (and the kids) it was worth it. I took pictures of all the kids' profiles, printed them, and cut them out to use as a tracer. You could try to get the kids to stand super still and trace their shadow, but for me that seemed to be more difficult. Ha! 

Then I traced all the profiles on one side of a big black piece of construction paper.

Cut the faces out of the construction paper and then glued a color of their choice to the back. 

Then we glued the writing on the other side of the black paper. 

To add another fun aspect and incorporate technology, we recorded our writing on FlipGrid so parents could scan the QR code and see/hear their child reading their writing. This would also serve the purpose as the big reveal!! Wooo!! 

I recently went to a local technology conference and this was the first time I learned about FlipGrid, so this was our first experience using it in the classroom as well. The students loved it and they especially loved adding the stickers to their pictures at the end. I limited them to three for our first few times. 

If you haven't checked out FlipGrid, you totally should. You as the teacher come up with the topic and the questions. Then the students just type in the code that leads to it and they start recording their response - no logins required, just the code. Super easy for the students to use. In fact, we also used it for our reflections to share with parents at conferences. I had them record answers to the following questions: "What is one thing you are doing well and one thing you want to work on?" & "What has been your favorite part of first grade so far and why?" This was fun to share with parents at conferences, too. If you've used FlipGrid before, I would love to hear your favorite ways to use it. We've just scratched the surface and I'm sure we'll be using it so much more in the future. 

I learned another cool tip at the conference, and maybe I'm totally behind the times, but it was the QR code extension on Google Chrome.  That's how I made all of the QR codes for each of the students' projects. You can make a QR code quickly for any webpage. Cool, right?

All in all, this project was a hit with the teacher, students, and the parents. The kids were so excited for their parents to see it and guess which one was theirs. It's also so fun to see because I can totally tell who almost all of them are just by their profile. Love it!!

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Student Ornaments

I can't remember where I ran across this idea for student ornaments this year, but they turned out super cute! The only downside to these is that the kids didn't do too much of the work, but I love that their picture is on it.

I should've taken more pictures of the process, but here are the steps:

1. Take student pictures like they are having fun in the snow. :)
2. Print the pictures in color (if possible) - I fit 6 on a page I think.
3. Take on the tedious task of cutting around all those cute little kiddos.
4. Have your kids or amazing helpers punch out lots of little circles with a regular hole punch and white paper.
5. Using a laminator pouch, place two rows of curvy white paper down inside.
6. Sprinkle the "snow" dots inside the pouch as well. Add a little glitter to make it shine.
7.  Then place the kids' pictures down on top of the snowy hill with enough space to cut a circle around them. (I was able to fit 4 students on a page)
8. Carefully close the pouch and run through the laminator (with your fingers and toes crossed! ha! - it really wasn't that bad)
9. I cut a circle from our die cut machine and then traced the circle on the back side of each student and then cut them out. I didn't trust myself enough to cut them out with the die cut.
10. Punch a hole at the top and string through some fishing line or yarn and then you're all set!!

I had the kids wrap their ornament with colored printing paper and then sent them home. From the sounds of it, the parents loved them. Win!

What are some of your ideas for student ornaments? I'd love to hear! I never seem to do the same thing each year, although I really liked how these turned out.

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