8th Grade Humanities Essay Model Project

While looking for ideas to teach writing, an ongoing quest for my humanities partner, Anne Cadigan and me, it was my good fortune to run across a 1997 article from English Journal by Linda Hecker entitled, “Walking, Tinkertoys, and Legos:  Using Movement and Manipulatives to Help Students Write.”  I even think that I had read the article before, yet this time it inspired me to try something new with my students in order to help them solidify their understandings of the five paragraph essay structure.  Unleashing the creative power of my eighth graders and allowing students to express themselves in a modality other than writing, students had to create their own 3-D models of the essay using any materials available to them.  Please enjoy their many different visions and their explanations.

Click here to view the essay projects.

Sandra Cordes-Vaughan, Humanities Instructor