Hojo's Teaching Adventures

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United States History ABC Books

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Last spring one of the ways we met a variety of standards was by having students complete an ABC book about United States history. They did research, wrote a minimum of five sentences per letter, presented parts of their book to the class, and published the entire book to be shown at an open house to the public. It was a great experience for them all!

Here I’m going to show you what the expectations were for the students, how I helped keep it all organized, and some of the finished products!

The picture below shows how I kept everything organized! I am a big list/organization person, so I made sure to keep this folder with me at all times.

This is a picture of my checklist. It’s pretty rough, but it worked well for me! I kept track of exactly what letters students turned in and what day it was turned in (the circled “L” means it was late!).
Here’s the checklist that was on the back of each student’s folder. (I gave each a folder to help keep themselves organized.) You can see that it gave students the exact requirements and due dates. I also had the students sign the bottom stating they understood and would follow through on everything. (This was communicated with parents as well!)
Here are a couple pictures of the finished United States ABC Books.

This takes a little work to set it up the first time, but I think the benefits greatly outweigh the time you put in! If you want to save a little time, you can download my $2.00 product at Teachers Pay Teachers by clicking on the picture below.
By clicking on the picture above, you get all of the requirements your students will need to do to successfully complete an ABC picture book over United States History. (Of course I have cleaned up the rough drafts you saw in the pictures! Your copies will be nicely typed out.) There is also a 20 point rubric to make grading easier for you. The third sheet provided is a timeline to give to students so they can stay organized and finish the project in a timely manner. You will also be given a master copy timeline so you can track what students have finished. Finally, you will be given a letter to send home informing parents of the project. (Two formats to choose from.) All of these sheets will be given to you in a zip file containing both Word and PDF format so you can modify them to fit your needs.
Now – if this entire thing seems a little too daunting, but you still like the idea — no worries! Laura Candler has a great little freebie ABC book that you could easily use to take on this project! It would be easier to set up and your students would only need to write 1-3 sentences to fill it all in.

One last thing – Teachers Pay Teachers is having a sale! You will be able to get all of my items (and many other sellers’!) up to 28% off! You can’t go wrong with that. =)

I’d love to hear whether or not you plan to do this project in your classroom!
~HoJo~ 

Comments

  1. 1

    This project looks fabulous! We study California history in 4th grade, so mine would be California ABC history books, but I think I might do this near the end of this coming school year! I'm so glad your product has editable files so that I can easily make that change. Thanks so much for sharing!

    -Dani
    A Place to Thrive

    Reply

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