Visual Voyages: Class Scrapbook
Objective:
For each student to focus on a particular category within one religion. For students to be exposed to another religion they don't know a lot about. To represent their category visually. To create a class scrapbook of many categories with many religions.
Materials:
You will need many different visual image sources such as the Internet, books, magazines, etc. You will also need something for the kids to put their pages in, like a three-ring binder.
The Lesson:
Each student should choose a category from one religion. For example: Jewish leaders, Buddhist sacred spaces, etc. (See below for a full list). Then, the student should look for visual representations of that category and create a page for a scrapbook from the research they've done.
If you choose to focus on the five major religions, you could have the following categories:
- Leaders
- Sacred Places and Spaces
- Symbols
- Holidays and Festivals
- Rites of Passage
There is no shortage of possibilities here. If you wanted to, you could add some smaller religions and use the same categories. The idea is that when you finish, you will have a representation of many different religions and how they are similar or different under these universal themes.
- Day one: Students choose categories. The teacher needs to monitor this so that kids are doing different categories. A table on the board works well for this. Begin researching the category.
- Homework for this day: Finish researching.
- Day two: Assemble pages in class. If necessary, students could finish this as homework.
- Have students put their pages in the book (a three-ring binder works well). It should be organized by category, not religion. That way, you see all of the symbols pages together, and all of the leaders' pages together, etc. After it is assembled, pass it around for everyone to look at.
Follow-up/Assessment:
Students could try to guess which page was covering which category. Keep the scrapbooks and throughout the unit; you can use them as resources.