The Very Important Me Project

The Very Important Me project is one that I am very excited and also very nervous about. I really want it to be successful and haven't done it before, let alone with 100 first graders. We will celebrate in class along the way as well as when we get to see the final product. We will get to step back and see the big picture and celebrate on all that we have learned over the year. The lesson is broken up into quite a few smaller parts. I did a portion of the project each week over the course of 4 weeks. I only see the students once a week for 55 minutes, so we did a little step in conjunction with other classroom work.

During the first portion of this class we will be writing our Rough Drafts for the Very Important Me video that we will be creating for the first grade classes. This is a much larger project that will celebrate individual student learning. We will start by reflecting on a video clip that we watched called the Good Birds Club from Sesame Street in which Big Bird tries to join a group called the Good Birds Club. He identified a few things that he felt made him important while others only focused on outward physical appearances. Students will be writing rough drafts of what makes them important focusing on the inside and not the outside.

The second class we will type these rough drafts into Word, focusing on capital letters, correct spelling, punctuation as well as font and font size. You can either have students print their work to save for later or save for them to use with the next step.

The third class will be to draw in Paint a picture that reflects their important characteristic using three different mediums. How do the pictures help tell the story of how each student is important. We will print these in color after we have copied and pasted our typed sentences for our Very Important Me project.

After this process has been completed, (Each student has their Picture with their Word documents) I recorded each student reading their finished work and turning those into a classroom Video for each to take home. They will also take home their final finished hard copy.