Living Museum fun!

Last week I posted about our Tall Tales Living Museum. I promised more pictures in my next post, so here they are! (If you missed the last post, you can find it here.)

The sign I had for our Museum. If you're a Georgia teacher, you know that Pecos Bill and Thunder Rose are not in our standard about tall tale heroes. I had to decide between having larger groups and adding in some extra tall tale people. I decided to go with extra people. Pecos Bill was an easy pick. Thunder Rose was a last minute decision. You are probably wondering who in the world Thunder Rose is because you've never heard of her, am I right?! I found the book in our school media center (you can see it here on Amazon) and thought it might work. Thunder Rose was a great addition because it was another female for our Living Museum.

Here are the kids' scripts, all typed up and laminated. They wrote their own text-I just helped them with conventions and getting it into the printer. 95% of the time we roll right along happily with invented spelling (as long as sight words are spelled correctly!), but for a project like this where multiple people need to be able to read the writing I do act as the "editor" alongside my writers.

Here is a pic of some of my groups hard at work practicing their scripts! My class this year consists of pretty great readers, so we were able to focus hard-core on prosody (reading with inflection).

The sweet little kiddoes in my Pecos Bill group really worked hard. Here is the poster they made:

 Their writing is so adorable! Here's the last little bit of their piece: "He fighted a half-gorilla. He squeezed all of the poison out of a snake." Check out their invented spelling-isn't it adorable?

 The day of the museum went off without a hitch. The cool thing was all of the first grade teachers were hosting their own Tall Tales museum so our students got to visit each class. They loved it! One teacher down the hall had a real beaver skin as the activator for her Davey Crockett group and that's ALL the students could talk about!

Our last little step in the process is to wrap up their individual pieces about their tall tale heroes. We are going to compile the pieces into a class book and then I will enhance the pages of the book with the app Aurasma. Aurasma allows you to attach a video to a print image. That means when students (or parents, or whomever) scans the pictures in the book with my i-Pad or i-Touch the videos will pop up on the device...they will get to see and hear the performances from the Living Museum as if they were there! Isn't that neat?

Next week I'll be going to LRA in Florida to present on the Living Museum. As if that weren't exciting enough, I just got an e-mail this week saying my colleagues' and my proposal for the International Literacy Association conference next summer got accepted! We will be presenting there again about the Living Museum. Looks like I need to start saving some money for an airplane ticket!

This week is all about some much-needed R&R. We went on a little mountain trip this past weekend and after the Thanksgiving festivites we will be celebrating Little Miss' 3rd birthday. I've also been working very hard on some things for my TpT shop. Yesterday I updated my Christmas Around the World set I made last year...

I added a souvenir suitcase to store all of the little readers from this book along with a world map and a passport stamp booklet: 

We will be using it when we get back from the break. I am super excited about incorporating some holiday fun into our ELA and Social Studies time!

Today I also uploaded some little readers I've been working on. They are holiday themed for the month of December...

I think all of them are cute, but the Rockin' Reindeer one is my favorite! I am going to use these for some easy-peasy sub work for when I'm out next week at LRA. I think these will be awesome Morning Work activities that the kids will enjoy and most importantly, can do independently! If you are interested click the picture to go to my TpT store!

That's it for tonight...now I need to make a grocery list for my pre-Thanksgivng shopping trip. Ugh. I am dreading going to the grocery store tomorrow...I'm going to have to reward myself with some coffee or something to make it through! Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving!