Voila-Seven CCSS Activities You Can Do Now

Hi everyone-

This is it—we're devoting all of our October posts to the Common Core State Standards. I guarantee that each of us has a different take on this subject, but of course it’s no big surprise that we like CCSS.  We like it a lot.  What else would you expect, since teachers at every grade level get to revel in some of the (ahem) most excellent nonfiction books available, right? (Hint: say yes…)  So how can teachers and students have a blast with these books and learn everything worth learning at the same time? I’m thinking that a few suggestions are in order.

As it turns out, we should be able to make this easy for everyone today because I recently got a lucky break. I've had the chance to add some outstanding classroom projects to my website, and they're directly tied into every possible aspect of CCSS. They were created by a true Common Core aficionado named Dr. Rose Reissman, who really knows her stuff when it comes to fun activities that instill the love of learning into just about anything. So............

Below is a link to a set of six incredible projects geared directly toward the book Witches! The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem.

 

Here you’ll find step-by-step directions for these six activities: Help kids write, stage, and perform a play that tells the tale; Create a great dictionary of strange words and terms related to the Witch Trials; Play a cool game called Which Witch Perspective Rings True?; Go Back to the Future to re-write the shameful events of 1692 using 21^st Century values; Treat the book as a framework for writing a scary ballad or and Edgar Allen Poe style poem about it; Or have a 21’st Century Mock Trial Do-Over of the Witch Trials.  You can access these activities directly by going here:

http://www.rosalynschanzer.com/pdfDocuments/CCSSWitchesActivities.pdf

 

 And here’s the link to a great Alphabet Book project that ties into Witches! and two other books to boot: George vs. George: The American Revolution as Seen from Both Sides and What Darwin Saw: The Journey that Changed the World. 

As an extra added attraction, this is an excellent project for all kinds of additional nonfiction books, and it works well for a broad age range too.  Here’s the link:

http://www.rosalynschanzer.com/pdfDocuments/AlphabetActivity.pdf

To make your lives even easier, these activities are filled with details and print-outs (which means they’re too long to display directly in this blog, so check the links).Tie-ins to professional CCSS lingo are presented in spades for each activity.

 More to follow....if you try out any of these projects, I’d love to hear what happens.