Student Posters: Culture Celebration Prep

Students' culture cards were combined to create a rainbow. 

Today students will create posters.

Many might think, "Posters?  That's so outdated?"  Yet, there's still a place for posters in today's classroom.  Our posters will serve as a way to present students' wonderful culture writing and research for our upcoming culture celebration.

Altogether the posters will present the collective image of our class culture--the stories, flags, foods, fashion, and fun. The posters will also remind children of the important role of text features such as titles, subtitles, images, diagrams, and informational paragraphs in a hands-on way.

Facilitating poster creation with 20+ fourth graders is a busy task.  The first challenge is slowing them down because they can't wait to glue all the images and titles on the board. To prevent this, I'll start the day by introducing the poster steps:

• Organize and review all of your poster images, research, and writing.
• Trim poster pieces and add background paper.
• Make poster titles with the die-cut machine (and a parent helper).
• Place the poster pieces on the board.
• Check the board with a teacher who will make sure that all the required information is placed on the board.
• Paste neatly with lots of glue and using a piece of plain paper to make sure the paste is even.
• Store the poster behind the teacher's desk.



Students will create culture cards. We'll post the culture cards
on a grade-wide "rainbow bulletin board" with the following quote:



"Our flag is red, white and blue, but our nation is a rainbow. . ."

- Jesse Brown

• Read quietly or help a classmate with his/her poster creation.

We'll start the activity first thing this morning while children are fresh and alert. In the afternoon, once the busy poster activity is complete, we'll spend time preparing the all-class displays including our culture "rainbow" cards, culture line plots, and written/illustrated depiction of Blanco's poem, "One Today."

The next few days will be very busy as we prepare for our celebration--the final stage before the celebration is always a bit daunting, but in the end it's worth the effort when it comes to creating a vibrant learning community.

Example of student posters.