I absolutely love the recent assignment that Porter and his fellow 4th graders completed. They were studying the American Revolution and they had to create an ABC book, using their 4th grade knowledge but presenting the information so that 1st graders would understand what they’re reading. In fact, every 1st grader in the school received the actual finished product from a 4th grader. How cool is that?
As you might imagine, we just printed duplicates of everything so that we could keep a copy of this for our family. We used a Cherry Mini Album and found all the images online, thanks to google. Porter researched what to write about each person/place/battle/event and we typed it out. He drew each letter of the alphabet.
Everything in the Mini Album is 3×4 and 4×6 of course. My tip for getting all the text centered? Just set up a Word document (I use Pages on a Mac) and create text boxes that are just slightly larger than 3×4 and 4×6 so that when you trim those down, you have the exact sizes you need.
Also, I chose to center the text top/bottom as well as left/right for all the cards. Here’s how I set up the images and text box for what we slipped into the title page.
Yes, this was a family effort. No, we still don’t know what grade he got on the project.
…..
You can imagine our delight when we heard of 10-year-old Gavin taking the very same approach on a different topic! Check this out.
His ABC book is in a Kiwi Mini Album. This is what Gavin’s mom Jessica shared with us:
Each year at Gavin’s school they have an Arts & Academics Expo and each year I encourage my kids to choose a project to do. They have a lot of different categories to choose from and Gavin has entered a project every year since Kindergarten (he is now in 4th grade). He has done construction projects (building structures out of Legos), a science project (charting the accuracy of weather predictions), and photography (taking and submitting a photo).
This year he decided to do a historical project. He started reading the “Percy Jackson & the Olympians” series of books this winter and became interested in Greek mythology. So for his expo project, he decided to do a historical look at Poseidon, who is his favorite Greek god. He started doing his research and hadn’t yet decided the best way to display his information, until I happened to be on Facebook and saw your picture of your son’s ABC mini album.
Inspiration struck and I showed Gavin the post. He thought it was a really great idea and liked the idea of an ABC album to showcase his information about Poseidon. He thought it was something that no one else would do, so it would make his project unique. I quickly ordered the album from Amazon, had it 2 days later, and Gavin went to work on putting it all together. He wrote the ABC cards and Terms on 3×4 Journaling Cards, and then we worked together to type up the text and insert photos on the 4×6 cards.
The expo was on March 21st, and the judges were very impressed with his presentation.
