A colleague shared a fun idea at our Differentiated Instruction cohort meeting. She took photos of her students in various poses, cut out their silhouettes, and told them to place these cut-outs in any setting they wanted. She reported that they were fully engaged and that the activity revealed a lot about their interests and their memories. Her next step is to have them write the memory or the story they've created in this setting.

In studying map skills, students in my class wrote Where I'm From poems. They were instructed to use repetition as their poetic tool and to share Texas facts. They also had to have one line include one of the vocabulary terms from the map skills section.

Example:
Where I'm from, the pecan tree is the state tree.
Where I'm from, there are nine counties.
Where I'm from is north of the equator.
Where I'm from, they dress like cowboys.
Where I'm from, there's a lot of Mexican food.
Where am I from? Texas, the second biggest state in the U.S.

or Texas, the lone star state, etc. You get the point. Some of them rhymed and a few were quite touching. Today they typed them in the computer lab and added clip art!