Books and Buildings

In a small classroom with many students, it can be difficult enough to keep track of what everyone is doing when there is only one project underway. When different students are working on different projects, classroom management can be a real challenge. After our last lesson where we introduced the comic books to our class, our students were all at different stages of production. Some of them were nearly finished with their comics, and others had barely started them. We knew that if we wanted to give them another class period to finish their comics, the students would need another activity to transition to as they finished.

We came up with our city building exercise because we thought it would be a fun and creative activity that the students would enjoy, and because we have not had many projects involving 3 dimensional construction this year. When planning the lesson, we used several strategies to make it easier for our students to work on more than one lesson in a class. We were confident that the city building would be something our students were capable of working on by themselves. The materials provided were versatile and simple to work with. This allowed each student to begin working independently whenever they finished their comic books and stay on task without much direction from the teacher. We felt that the project would be exciting enough to hold the students' attention naturally. We kept our building supplies together on a large table in the corner of the room. This meant that the students who were working on city building naturally congregated around it and separated themselves from the students finishing comic books. This made it easier for the teachers to tell what each student was working on, and prevented students that were working on different projects from distracting each other. We were also concerned that students might rush through the comics to move on to the lesson. To remedy this, we tried to emphasize to students that the comic books were the main focus of the day's lesson. We also waited to introduce city building until several students had completed their comic books to keep them on task. Even though some students were still working on comics, we introduced our city building to the class as a whole so that we would only have to explain it one time. This allowed the teachers to focus on assisting individual students and let the students begin working on the city as soon as they finished their comics. We found our strategies to be very effective; all of our students finished their comics and successfully transitioned into city building. Classrooms can become chaotic when they are full of activity, but careful lesson planning can be used to avoid these problems in advance.