Community Quilt

The second graders at my placement are a bit more challenging than all of the other grades. They are beginning to assert their independence and test their boundaries with each other. My mentor teacher was going to be out for a day and I had to come up with a one day project quick. I really wanted something that would be a group project so they could practice working as a group and give them more of a sense of community while still giving them freedom of expression and personal choice. I also wanted to incorporate some math and history. So, I went out looking for ideas and came across this paper quilt project.

This turned out to be the perfect project and one of the kids all time favorite. We had been working on creating patterns in the previous project and talked about how we see patterns in nature as well as our behavior so the goal was to create their own patterns within the given framework of the three sections the protractor created on each quarter square.

The kids got more and more excited as they saw their community quilt come together. They worked harder, got along, and praised each other for the good work they were doing. Afterwards, I took photos of each "quilting bee's" quilt and laminated miniature versions of them to hand out to each one of the kids.

This did only take one class period and it had me gluing and pasting like a mad woman! You'll notice that I messed up the combinations in the first two ~ but, by the last class I was more careful and put it together correctly.