A Tour of My "Colony" {Classroom Tour}

What a year this has been!  Can you believe it is MAY already???!!!

Well, with May comes Open House at my school.  This is the time where we display the great projects and learning that the kids have been doing and invite the parents in to see it all.

This year, since we were smack-dab in the middle of our 13 colonies unit, I thought it would be awesome to research what an actual early colonial village would look like and then turn the room into said colony.   This took a lot of research on the students' part, and a lot of butcher paper on mine, but I think the final product was amazing!  The kids did so much work, and it really showed.  So now, without further ado, I present to you the Colony of Moormania :)


Here are two pictures of the entire room.  Both are views from the front of the room.Just click on any picture to enlarge.

In this picture you can see the "Floating Colonies", the informational writing on the colonial regions, our colonial shops (blacksmith, wheelwright, and milliner), colonial home, and livestock area. 

In this picture you can see our informational writing (after doing a close read to find main idea) on colonial clothing, our colonial meeting house, the Walking the Colonies Map, a close read on colonial quilts, the actual quilt we sewed, and some other math and science work.







The next pictures are close ups of the actual colony spaces that the kids created.

Colonial Church

The Milliner Shop with sign above doorway.

The Wheelwright Shop with sign

A blacksmith shop with sign

The Colonial Meeting House

A Colonial Home

The students also did a lot of close reading and writing.  The students were researching, learning our standards, and responding at high levels.  Here are the responses they wrote.

Colonial Clothing

Food in Colonial Times

The Colonial Quilting Myth

Games in Colonial Times

We also delved into science in colonial times with weather vanes and chemical/physical reactions.

Exploring and experimenting with weather vanes and their axises.

Looking to see whether various colonial activities (like making soap or baking bread) involved physical changes or chemical changes.

Our "Floating Colonies" research projects and informational writing about the 13 colonial regions.

We did some math projects as well.  Colonial quilt math and then planning our village.

We also made a quilt and practiced sewing (though because it has names on it ...the kids sewed their names onto their square) I don't want to post the completed thing.  Here is one student sewing one square though.

OK...so that pretty much takes you on the entire tour of my room.  I hope you enjoyed it!  I will be blogging at a later time more in depth about some of the things here, but for now...I will leave you with the pictures.  Thank you for joining me on the tour!