Using Projects to Represent Learning

Using projects evolved from a need to help students share their learning in a variety of different ways. I discovered early in my classroom teaching experience that some students had a wealth of knowledge, but that they were unable to truly share it in written activities. I decided to try using projects for representing their learning, and I have never looked back.

Here are some of my most popular social studies projects as well as a couple of other special projects.

This 3D community project started out as a class project where the class created the community from beginning to end based on what we learned during our study of what a community needs. Our celebration was our chance to share what was learned during this unit.

Check out one of our communities below.

I find that Social Studies lends itself well to projects. Most of my projects deal
with Canada and the provinces and territories, but I have also done some
projects that are more global.

This project compares life of early settlers and First Nations people of the Pacific Northwest and the Plains.

This project studies the various industries and services for particular areas.

This project looks at how communities have changed in the past 50 to 100 years.

This project focuses on the provinces and territories and special symbols and information about them.

My heritage project came from a need to help a child feel proud of who she
was because she was embarrassed to let others know her heritage. By the
end of this project, she was sharing with everyone and she was excited to tell others about all the countries that made her special.

Our Solar System was one of my first school/home projects that required the children to choose from a variety of activities to share their learning. It also contained a criteria marking sheet so that they knew what was expected and
how it would be graded from the beginning. It was amazing to see how they rose to the challenge. Including the families when it came time to create the projects was a great way of communicating what we were doing at school.

Check out some of the projects that my students created. The greatest part
was when they shared them with the families and other guests. Their pride
and the positive atmosphere made it all worthwhile.

I love how ideas come from students and their needs. My class was learning about money and we ending up creating a money unit together.
It was great using real life experiences for creating the unit. We even ended
it with a big fundraising event to raise money for our year end field trip.

Here is a summary of some of the lessons and a couple of pages to go with lesson 5. Click on the grid if you would like a copy.

I hope that you have found these ideas helpful. I would love to hear about how you use projects in your classroom to represent learning.