4th quarter, I really wanted to give my students the chance to travel our state and use technology. I had been trying to formulate a brochure-type project all year, so I finally decided to just jump in and launch a Travel Brochure project.

Every student at our school has a google account, so we have been using google drive a lot this year. I decided to create this project in google slideshow (like powerpoint). I created a format for the travel brochures and shared it with students in a "copy" only format. Each student made a copy of the template for themselves.

North Carolina's regions are the Piedmont, Mountains, and Coastal Plain. Since we live in the Piedmont, I decided to start with the Mountains and the Coastal Plain. Students created a brochure related to both of these regions. {We ran out of time before we got to the Piedmont with our brochure projects!}

The template I shared with students was a little prettier than what you see below (I used some of the clipart frames I have purchased. However, I cleaned up my file before sharing it with you to refrain from breaking the clipart seller's terms of use).

I also shared a lengthy document of various museums and educational sites in North Carolina with students through their google accounts. Since our focus was on United States history as it relates to North Carolina and other important aspects of North Carolina History, I did not allow students to research science-based places.

Through this project, students learned a lot about the Lost Colony of Roanoke, Colonial History, Civil War history, Native Americans (mainly the Cherokee), and Pearl Harbor. I also had students study the Elizabethan Gardens, a radio museum, the birthplace of Pepsi, Kitty Hawk, (where Orville and Wilbur had their first successful flight), lighthouses, and a variety of other places and topics.

You can make your own copy of these documents so that you can edit them to use with your own class. (Note: Some of the links in the travel sites list are dead. I didn't take the time to fix them during our project, but allowed my students to google information for those sites and helped them find the organization's main website so that they would have it for researching.)

I saved our Travel Brochure celebration for Thursday of the last week of school, mainly because students needed more time to get their brochures "print-ready." This may have been one of the reasons we stayed mostly sane after testing--we had a project to continue working on.

This project was more of a "loved it" project for my students. It was another one of those projects that I was asked daily if we were going to have time to work on them.

It was also another project that we could have completed through pencil and paper, but since this project was completed online, it was more engaging--recall my students' excitement and motivation with their Bill Peet Picturebook projects. (I even printed off the template for them to complete a handwritten draft and decided that was a waste of time--I struggle with requiring handwritten drafts versus going straight to computer processing all the time, but that's for another post!)

My favorite thing about this project (and something I want to try to recreate next year in as many ways as possible) was that my students got to cycle through doing the same basic thing more than once. 

The brochure project was big enough to require research, time, and effort to put a nice one together (focused on the mountains), but the project was manageable enough that students were able to complete a second brochure (focused on the coast).

I have found that it is rare that we take students through nearly the same process or activity in an effort to allow them to

1) use the skills they acquired in the first go-round

2) get to start fresh on a similar project

3) demonstrate greater independence, and

4) try to go above and beyond the level of work they did in the first attempt.

{And I think this is a missed opportunity in education.}

I am SOOO looking forward to reflecting over the summer and coming up with more ways to build "an ethic of excellence and a culture of craftsmanship"  with repeated activities next year. (This link is an affiliate link that sends you to the book by the same title. This means that I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. Read my full disclosure here.)

I loved that students got to know a lot of places around North Carolina. When they initially chose the place they wanted to research, they spent one class period just reading about different sites you could visit and tour.

During our celebration, students were exposed to even more places around North Carolina that they could visit...best of all, many of the travel sites are free or cheap. I thought this was a great way to send students off for summer...with a list of potential state-history related places to try to visit. Overall, our travel brochure project was a complete success!

If you missed any of my other highlights, you can click through here.

#10 Transitioning to a New School

#9 Spiral Math Homework

#8 "One Thing" Goal Setting Strategy

#7 School Budget {Govt} Project

#6 Bill Peet Author Study Projects

#5 Poetry Workshop

#3 Classroom Read Alouds {Chapter Books}

#2 Ecosystems Museum Projects

#1 "Teach Me How to Teach" Projects

BONUS: Top Math Highlights