End of the Year Brochures

Well it's the wonderful end of the year.  We've been through testing fun days, write-up free days, awards assemblies, packing, cleaning, sending things home, inventories, grades, filing, and all the other wonderful little tidbits that you have to do.  One thing I wanted to do this year was to add a fun project at the end of the year so my third graders could look back on the year and make it something my new class could benefit from.  As I looked around for ideas I saw students doing letters and similar things, but I loved the idea of doing a brochure (can't remember where I saw the idea).

My kids adore using the laptops to publish their writing so I decided the end of the year would be a great time to take that a step farther.  I created a brochure template and decided on four topics: What you love about third grade, how you felt when you came to third grade, fun things you do in third grade, and what you learned in third grade.  I went ahead and put the topics as headings on the brochure template and created textboxes for them to type in.  With this project my goals were for students to type their paragraphs, change fonts, navigate pages, edit text box borders and insert clip art.  We didn't work on the computers as much as I wanted this year, so those tasks in themselves would take a lot of time and effort.

We started by writing a paragraph for each topic.  This crew of kids aren't fans of writing so this is like pulling teeth, but this was something they could identify with, wasn't difficult, and they actually half-way enjoyed it.  When they found out they were getting to publish on the computer and do fonts and borders they were ecstatic.  Their next question was if they got to share them with the class.  They may not like writing but they definitely like talking. The kids loved this project and I can't wait to show them to next year's students.

It is easy to use one of the pre-made templates on Word or Publisher if you are doing editing on the computer.  If you want to be a little more low-tech with this assignment, you can get a free printable here.