List, Sort, Label

This activity really built interest when building background for our unit study on the American Revolution. We asked our third graders to look at the pictures provided, then sort them into categories. Students were to discuss how they would do this. Great conversation took place! After students categorized the pictures, they were given a sentence strip to label what the category represented. Our third graders were able to come up with 'battles', 'people', 'documents', 'maps' etc. It was a great way to spend 20 minutes activating and building their background knowledge. The next day we asked the students to look at the pictures again more closely and make some predictions. Awesome activity! Thanks to Jenn D. for this awesome idea!