Who's your hero?

What a loaded question, right? When I taught 4th grade, we did a unit on heroes. Now..I am all about a study on heroes and what makes them so special. But in this particular school, the books we used had Gloria Estefan as one of the heroes. Are you confused yet? Yea, so was I. Don't get me wrong I love me some "come on, shake ya body baby..do the conga" but  I was totally unsure about her being a hero of some sort. Along side Gloria, was Martin Luther King, Jr. & Lou Gherig. I could understand King, Gherig had me stumped again.

Of course once I actually read through their stories, I was humbled by what they had to conquer to get where they wanted to be. As a culminating project for this unit, I wanted to really test my students knowledge on character traits that should be connected to heroes. I came up with the idea of giving a hero award. Students had to pick one of the three above people, and come up with 3 character traits that contribute to their hero status. I taught a mini lesson on human characteristics and how to determine good ones verse bad ones.

For my example I used Abraham Lincoln. I read the "Abe's Honest Words" (seriously amazing book) and then showed my hero certificate that I created for Abe.

I called my kiddos the "Hero Hunters" and sent them out on their own to come up with their awards.

(please excuse the "pre-blog" picture taking. I don't have any up close pics. I am going to hunt through my papers and see if I can find the class book I made and then I will update this post)

I was seriously blown away by how amazing they turned out. That's when you know you did a good job teaching a skill, when the student work is just absolutely awesome & all you want to do is BRAG about it to everyone that will listen!

This is the bulletin board I put up to showcase their certificates. I used the characteristics from the previous activity (I hung those up around the room & had my students go stand next to the characteristic they thought they represented most. I used that as my "hook" and boy did they find it challenging to narrow it down to only one)

I am having such a horrible time getting the certificate to upload to google docs, I think because it was made in publisher. So if you would like a copy, please email me & I can send it out...I hope :)