Six Word Memoirs

I've been sharing this Six Word Memoir learning activity created by Sarah Landis & Lisa Highfill with my colleagues.  I've also tried it out with a few classes and found it to be an engaging writing activity with some great options for infusing technology.  If you want to try this out, use the link to Landis & Highfill's hyperdoc above to get started!   

When I shared this activity in classrooms, we began by viewing a moving video called "The Conditioned" which is about a man named Raimundo and his life.  I've watched it several times now and it's super powerful every time.  

Students were then tasked with developing a six-word memoir to describe Raimundo's life.  Some of our Park West School Division students posted their completed memoirs to Padlet, so you can see samples  below:

Next, students thought about their own lives and wrote six word memoirs for themselves.  This was a bit more challenging, but students came up with some excellent memoirs to highlight their lives.  Once they'd chosen their six words, students designed a digital poster to share their memoirs.  Some classes used  Google Slides to put together their images and text and other classes used Canva to design their digital posters.  They turned out to be beautiful pieces of work and several students agreed to let me share their memoirs.  You can see some student samples below, courtesy of Mr. Baskerville's Grade 6 class and Mrs. Bowley's Grade 6/7 class.  

Designing Digital Posters with Binscarth Grade 7/8

I had the opportunity to work with an awesome group of Grade 7 and 8 students at Binscarth School last week.  This group of students used Canva to design digital posters related to the concepts they are studying in science class.   The posters turned out really well, so I asked students for permission to share their work here on my blog - you can see their designs below!

Designing digital posters is about more than just learning to use technology tools.  This project integrated important Literacy with ICT skills and science knowledge.  

• We began by co-constructing criteria for our work, which relates to LwICT outcome P-1.2 participates in establishing criteria for own work. 

• Next, students had to select a concept/term from their science studies and develop a description/definition of the term (which links to science outcome 8-3-01 Use appropriate vocabulary related to their investigations of fluids and LwICT outcomes G-1.1 gathers information from given source(s) and G-2.1 identifies relevant information from sources)

• Then, students had to select images that related to their concept and design a poster that conveyed the meaning of their concept/word (which links to the "Produce to Show Understanding" section of our LwICT continuum, particularly P-2.1 uses a given format to demonstrate learning and P-3.1 edits work based on feedback from teacher and/or peers, according to established criteria, conventions, and/or standards). 

• The final designs turned out really great!  Plus, I think that students will be able to use their knowledge of how to design digital posters as a way of sharing their learning for other projects and activities.  

P.S.  Canva recently announced free premium accounts for educators - get the details here!