Karen Achtman

As a fun concluding reading activity, we had the students create a diorama of one of our reading stories.  They picked their favorite story from the year and chose one scene to recreate.  I also created a simple rubric and a place for them to write the title, genre, and sequence of events of the story.

Students enjoyed being creative and designing the characters and setting.  They needed to use a lot of details, which helped some of them take their time and show their artistic side.  This project was challenging for those students who are not as strong in creativity, but it was a good experience to expose them to thinking outside the box.

This was a multi-day project, but the students really enjoyed it.  It took a lot of work to create the diorama and write about it!  This was a good, culminating activity for the students to demonstrate what they’ve learned throughout the year about all the literary elements.  A lot of choice was involved in picking the story and deciding how to best represent it.  The sequence writing was also a good way for students to use a lot of details to describe what happened in the Beginning, Middle, and End of their story.

After the dioramas were done, students did a gallery walk around both classrooms to share and see others’ work.  I was very impressed with their creations and would love to have students build dioramas again!