Teachin' with Altitude : Martin's Big Words

Last week we read Martin's Big Words.

I was thinking this might be too "little kiddish" for my fifth graders, nope it was great! (And it is an Accelerated Reader book too!)

I loved the great quotes that were bolded in the text. Made for an on the spot teaching moment about bolded words being important and how we knew they were important. How come these words would be bolded, how do you think that fits in with the title of the text...etc...It was great conversation. I decided that after reading it we would all trace our hands on card stock, trace the pencil outline in dark crayon or marker and then color our hands using Crayola's Multicultural Markers.

If you have never seen these markers they are amazing. Coming from a school where most of my kids were Hispanic these markers were incredibly awesome because they were finally able to color kids that looked like them. My students here in Florida were just as mesmerized with this concept that they could color their hands to match their skin. Some of them were even coloring on their hands with the markers to find that perfect match, it was a great think to see. So while they were coloring their hands I was writing all the awesome quotes on sticky notes and then giving the kids colored card stock to write the quotes on. They were asked to write the quotes in big blocky letters and make them stand out.

We discussed whether to put them on the windows that face the school yard (where the whole school passes to go to lunch) or put them on the windows that face the car rider line. The car rider line won! So we hung the hands up in the windows, some of them interlaced with other hands, some by themselves with the various quotes from the book.
Then we took a field trip around the school building to see our art work.