A Peek at My Week {4-27-14}

It's that time again...Time to get together for another Peek at My Week!  Thanks for stopping by.  I hope you will link up and share your plans for this week too!

I can't believe that we are winding down to the end of another month and that by this time next week, it will be MAY!!!  April sure flew by...

I'm excited because in  reading, we are going to begin a three week study of Mythology.  I'll admit, when we first started working with Common Core and I found out that I needed to include Mythology vocabulary and allusions in my teaching, I was NOT excited.  I had never read any Mythology and didn't know anything about it, but boy, did my students L.O.V.E. it and now I LOVE teaching it too!

This year, I designed a new product that is based on many of the activities we have been doing in my classroom that my students have enjoyed.  I call it Mythology Museum & More!

If you remember back to the fall, my students did a Native American Museum project to learn about a particular Native American group that lived in Wisconsin in the past.  This was the inspiration for my new Mythology Museum.

This week, students will work in groups of three to learn about a Greek god or goddess.  They will then prepare a poster board to teach the rest of the class about their mythological character.  These posters will be set up in a Mythology Museum for our class and others to visit.  The Mythology Museum displays will include:

A drawing or sketch of their god or goddess

Five fast facts about their god or goddess

A bio poem

Trading cards for museum visitors to fill out and keep after visiting the museum display

Carefully chosen artifacts to represent their god or goddess.

This is a great way for students to be creative and crafty -- 

Bring on the Legos!

After learning about the major players in mythology through this project, we will read different versions of the same myth to compare and contrast them. (This is a Common Core skill for 4th grade.)

We will also discuss allusions.  In the past, I taught the most popular allusions (Midas Touch, Pandora's box, etc.) but they always seemed so disconnected from my student's lives.  So in my Mythology Museum & More unit, students learn about the allusions, but also relate them to their own lives.

If you are gearing up to teach Mythology (or have avoided it in the past because you didn't know what to do), you can win this unit simply by pinning it and leaving the link in a comment below!  Two winners will be chosen on Tuesday.  Or if you can't wait, you can pick up your own Mythology Museum & More in my TPT Store on sale through Monday.

I know my students will be so psyched to begin working on their museums.  I hope to have our museum displays ready on Friday and will share more pictures next week.  This time of year, we need to bring out all the fireworks to keep our students motivated to keep working and learning and projects like this do the trick!

An InLinkz Link-up

I hope you have a great week!  See you back here on Thursday for Positive Thinking Thursday if not sooner.