Explorer Instagrams

My fourth graders have just finished their unit on Explorers!  I saw this really fun post by Erin Klein on her blog (Here) about how she used "Instagram" to explore characters in a book she was reading with her students.  After talking with the fourth grade teachers, they agreed to let me take one of their computer lab times to work with the students on how to do an image search and copy and resize in Word, with a little copyright information thrown in (of course!).

Since the students were studying the explorers, their task was to look up something that would have been important to one of the explorers.  They brought their Social Studies notebooks to help them with ideas and we brainstormed a bit about items that would have been important (compass, ships, food, etc.) vs things they wouldn't have had (electronic devices!).

They had a lot of fun searching, resizing, and printing.  I used Mrs. Klein's Instagram template that she so graciously put on Teachers Pay Teachers.  Then the students got out the glue and scissors to get a little bit messy...  They also had to write a short sentence explaining why their picture would have been important to the explorer.  My favorites were the students who really got into the spirit of things and wrote from their explorer's point of view!

Overall, it was a fun, quick project that we managed to do in 45 minutes.  I'm loving seeing their Instagrams displayed on the walls upstairs along with their acrostic poems they completed in class!