First Grade Curators

Museum Night is almost here.  The first grade curators have been working hard to put the finishing touches on our exhibit.  

I explain to the kiddos that part of curating an exhibit is ensuring that visitors to the exhibit will be able to learn from the artifacts and displays.  They thought back about visiting the Natural History Museum and how we had learned about the animals there.  They decided that they would need to have some writing about the regions they had learned about.   They worked with in their table teams to create webs for each continent and ocean, and a web about the major mountain ranges.  Each web included a title, picture, an interesting fact, description and location of the region, and a list of some of the animals that live there.  

We also wanted to ensure that our visitors would be able to recognize everything on our map of the world.  To do this, the kiddos made labels for the continents, oceans, and mountain ranges.  They wrote and posted their labels in the proper place on the map.  (I labeled all of their animals with a label maker so they would be small and wouldn't interfere with primary focus of the exhibit.)  They have had lots of practice with labeling in writing, but it was fun to have such a hands-on experience with deciding what to label and how to label it.

All of our museum projects are closely aligned to the DC standards for first grade.  For this project, we focused on our geography standards:

• Social Studies 1.1.1 Locate the cardinal direction (e.g. north, south, east, and west) and apply them to maps and globes.
• Social Studies 1.1.4 Label the continents, oceans, and mountain ranges on a map.

Of course, we also incorporated a lot of other standards throughout the development and planning, including the Common Core ELA standards for reading and writing: 

• RI.1.7  Use the illustrations and details in a text to describe its key ideas.
• RI.1.10  Know and use various text features (e.g., headings, tables of contents, glossaries, electronic menus, icons) to locate key facts or information in a text.
• W.1.7  Participate in shared research and writing projects

Here are a few picts of the final product.  The kiddos are so excited to share it with their families and friends!