Our Growing Tree of Birds - Classroom Activity
The Our Growing Tree of Birds - Classroom Activity provides students with an engaging way to reflect on their personal growth throughout the school year. Each student writes about their achievements on bird-shaped cut-outs, which are then added to a collaborative classroom tree display. This creative activity helps students express pride in their accomplishments while fostering a sense of community.
Learning goals
- We are learning to identify and practise emotional responses.
- We are learning to use comprehension strategies to find literal and inferred meaning in texts.
Curriculum alignment
Identify and practise emotional responses that account for own and others’ feelings
ACELY1660 8.4 Use comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning about key events, ideas and information in texts that they listen to, view and read by drawing on growing knowledge of context, text structures and language features ACHASSI034 8.4 Pose questions about past and present objects, people, places and eventsAustralian Curriculum covers QLD / SA / WA / NT / TAS / ACT.
Differentiation
Modifications
• For Students Needing Support:
- Simplified Prompts: Provide sentence starters like “One thing I learned is…”.
- Collaborative Brainstorming: Allow students to brainstorm their responses in small groups before writing.
- Examples on Display: Use pre-made bird examples as visual prompts to guide students.
• For Students Ready for a Challenge:
- Detailed Descriptions: Ask for detailed reflections that include how achievements were accomplished.
- Creative Storytelling: Let students create short stories around their reflection, incorporating their bird cut-outs.
- Peer Reflection Sharing: Have students share their reflections with a partner or the whole class.
Extensions
• Class Reflection Journal: Collect the bird cut-outs into a class reflection journal for students to take turns reading.
• Presentation Skills: Include opportunities for students to present their reflections to the class.
• Forward-Looking Goals: Link the reflection activity to setting new goals for future development.