I'm helping a friend do her homework-she's going to school to be a teacher. She's basically writing a unit study on a book. We need an idea for a art project for the book. The book she choose is "The Patchwork Path: a quilt map to freedom" by Bettye Stroud it's based on a true story about a young girl who's mom teaches her to make a quilt and the squares of the quilt are symbols. Anyway-we used the "have the kids make a quilt" idea for math (sorting, grouping, patterns, ect) so we kinda need a new idea for an art project. And we're coming up blank. This is for a 1st grade lesson plan. It doesn't have to be just about the quilt-there is mention of slavery and the underground railroad int he book and one part of her unit study plan is about Harriet Tubman. I'd love if if you ladies could help us out with some ideas.
How about having them map out the book on paper, drawing pictures and dots or lines to show where the people went from slavery to safety?
Yea, how about having them create their very own map of what THEY THINK the underground railroad would look like. You could give them markrs, crayons, paint, and odds and ends to work with as well (ex: small pom poms for trees/bushes) I would think a small piece of poster board would work. Explain what th UR was about, and how dangerous it was. Or have them draw a collage. Draw picture of all the things you think one would need on a trip through the underground railroad such as :friends, family, food, drink, bible, faith, hope, shelter. See what they can come up with on their own and have them write a short passage about their work (if they can write...not sure...sorry)
you could also have them follow a secret message and decipher secret coded messages to find their way through the underground railroad?
What about a scavenger hunt? Have each kid draw a slip of paper that has two numbers on it. Each number is a scene from the book. They illustrate the scenes on a piece of paper that is split in two horizontally. The teacher collects them and places them in random places then the kids are given clues to find them. The clues are passages from the book. At the end the kids need to put them in order and they make a road. Showing the timeline of the book. We did a similar project in elementary school. So if a passage is talking about a tree then we need to start looking at the trees to find our piece of the puzzle.
All good ideas but not what she is looking for. It has to be like JUST arts/crafts. Like there has to be 10 things covered and it can't overlap-like for technology I suggest spellingcity.com, but she couldn't use it because spelling/vocab is on of the other sections, so she couldn't use spellingcity for technology.... Like the map would count as SS, and she already had a SS activity.... It needs to be very simple and not have too much 'educational" value really silly what they are teaching teachers to teach! (though if you haven't read it, this is an AWESOME book-I'm gonna read it to my kids. I love the 3D map idea with pom-poms and such-I think we may do that! LOL)
What about making african masks? Just a templet and the kids can use whatever they like to decorate it.
