student+work+Mes

Mesopotamia: While the majority of the students in my class completed a report or poster for this project, the students I followed were split with half doing posters/reports and half doing something a little more creative. Arriel wrote a short report. As a student who doesn’t really get inspired easily, I wasn’t surprised by this. Her report was very well done and thorough, but there was little to no creativity. Lance created a poster for his first project. While Lance is a great student who is creative and producing excellent work, I am not sure he knew what to do with this extent of freedom. He created an extremely good poster with a large amount of information he gathered on his own, but it did lack some of the creativity I had hoped to see from him right off the bat. Nick created a two-sided diorama. This diorama showed the differences between life in Mesopotamia and life of the hunter gatherers that existed before farming. Nick had stated that dioramas were his favorite style of project, so this was not a surprise. While his diorama was pretty simple, he was able to get all the information across using two small scenes. I thought the whole thing was very well done and very creative. Sammi also decided to avoid the standard poster/report style when she created a travel brochure for the area/era. How she got the idea I am not sure, she later stated that she never made one before but that the idea seemed to fit. Just as a brochure advertises all the different aspects of a destination today, Sammi used the different areas of focus for this unit (and every unit) to create her Mesopotamian brochure. She wrote it in the style of actually advertising the area, people, culture, events, etc. This was completely what I had expected from her, a project that was above and beyond and very creative. While all the projects were well done, I just really feel that this might have been too much freedom for them right off the bat. I wanted to free the students creativity and let them create projects they could relate to and enjoy producing, however for most of the students I think they just felt like the need more direction. The result was even very good ambitious students like Lance quickly gravitated to a safer project that they had done many times before instead of trying something new

Sammi's Brochure: