8 Clever Classroom Uses for Paper Bags

We don't really think about them much...  kids bring their lunches in them, we put groceries in them, and sometimes they carry our last minute take-out meal.  Paper bags.  Paper bags have been around since the mid 1800s and, according to what I have read, haven't changed much in all these year.  Why mess with a good thing, I guess.

Paper bags have always been there to hold our "stuff" but it's time to give the paper bag the glory it deserves!  Here are 8 clever classroom uses that'll make you want to "brown bag" it this school year:

Ask your students to think outside the box, or should I say "inside the bag" for classroom projects. Creating an art piece and then filling the bag with items connected to the subject is a great way to connect art and content.  Students could:

• draw a self portrait  and fill the bag with items about themselves.
• draw an animal in its habitat and fill with items related to the animal studied.
• do a book report by drawing a scene or a character on the bag and then fill it with items the character might have or need in the story.
• do a historical research project. Students could draw a historical figures and fill the bag with "artifacts" related to the person or time period. 

I'm sure there are more ideas.  If you think of any, please share them with us in the comment section. 

This project was inspired by a pin on Pinterest.  You can find it HERE.

 Another way that I integrate art into our study of Native Americans of the Northwest is to make Chilkat Blankets.

In my class, I don't send student artwork home with students until Open House in the spring.  Instead, I share pictures of the artwork on our class Facebook group and display the originals in the halls at school.  When the artwork is taken down, we put our artwork in the portfolios.  Every year I purchase poster board for students to make art portfolios with.  While looking for ideas for this post I came across a pin on Pinterest about making art portfolios.  You can find the pin HERE.  

Using large grocery bags to make the portfolios is mind-blowing for me!  First, I love to recycle and reuse as much as possible.  This is a perfect example of that.  Second, paper bags are strong and with a little duct tape, you have a sturdy, attractive art portfolio for students to house their artwork all year long.  As an added bonus,  a lot of grocery bags have handles already built in (The ones I used in the picture didn't so I made my own.) which makes carrying the portfolios easy.  

Interactive Notebooks are all the rage...  and great teaching tools to boot!  Use small lunch bags to create pockets for storing small items such as vocabulary cards, index cards, and other items that need to keep contained.

 One lunch bag can make two pockets.  The pocket you see on the top opens up for easy access.

 The second pocket, used with the bottom of the bag, folds behind the flap to keep items contained and more secure.

Paper bags make great little interactive books.  Because they have pockets, they can hold slide-out cards, photographs, and other memorabilia.

 I made this book using three lunch bags.

 There are a lot of clever things about this little book.  The first is that it has larger pockets for photographs, cards, etc. to slide in and out.  I made little tape tabs for my cards to make them easy to pull out.

 When using lunch bags, you get blank pages to write on or down items.

The third things are these great little side pockets made with the ends of the bag.  

I love these little books and have been thinking about how they could be used in the classroom.  My first thought is as poetry books.  there is a lot of space to house poems and creatively illustrate student writing.  

Another idea would be to make a personal journal/keepsake/scrap book from another person's point of view.  As with the paper bag art above, students could use book characters or historical figures.  This would take some critical thinking on the part of the student and would be a wonderful end of novel or unit project.  Hmmm... Very interesting...  

Another great use for paper bags is to use them for journal covers.  I wrote a whole blog post on how to make these pioneer journals.  You can read it HERE.  

Everyone loves getting goodie bags, students and teachers alike!  Paper bags make cute little holders for any holiday or event.  For back-to-school consider making little packages for your students to welcome them your class.  Another great idea is to make packages for your colleagues with items teachers love.

Kids of all ages LOVE puppets!  Paper bag puppets are a great way to engage your students and get them thinking creatively.  Even with older students, puppets are a meaningful way to apply learning and show understanding of concepts.

Just like some ideas mentioned above, puppets can be used for traditional reports on historical figures, book characters, and animals reports.  But take a moment to ask your students to think a bit more abstractly.  What would a puppet of the cell look like?  What would it say?  How about a stomach, a germ, or even a volcano?  Think about the concepts you are teaching and challenge your students to come up with puppets and scripts to present what they have learned to the class.  This would be a wonderful alternative to the traditional exam or report!

It's summer and I don't have any puppets hanging out there at home, but I did find a lot of ideas for paper bag puppets on Pinterest.  here are just a couple: 

 

I'm awful at remembering birthdays.  Even my own family's.  One year I totally forgot my husband's birthday, which is in September... bad timing with back-to-school and all!  Eventually he forgave me, but because I am so bad with dates, I have to do everything I can to help myself remember these special occasions.

  

In the classroom I've helped myself by displaying students' birthday goody bags by month on one of the classroom walls.  It doesn't take up much room and saves me a ton of time.  Checking the birthday display now and then I get a quick peek at the birthdays for the month and have a birthday bag all prepared for each student.  No more scrambling to find those "Happy Birthday" pencils and stickers...  they are already packaged and ready to go! 

Paper bags are an easy answer for this display.  The personalized bag tags dress them up and they hang nicely when stapled to the wall.  

This summer I've worked on designing a brand new Birthday Display pack I'll be using in my own classroom.  I'm very excited to get it up on my wall this fall!  It includes editable bag tags and birthday book marks, 6 different birthday coupons, pencil flags, month headers, birthday crown, and "Happy Birthday" bulletin board letters.  This will make my year so much easier!

It's a brand new upload to my TpT store, so I'm selling it for 50% off through July!  Click on the product cover to take a look at it.  

And now, because you stuck around through all 7 of the ideas above...  Here is #8 and a FREEBIE for Back to School! 

About Me Bags are a great way to get to know your students at the beginning of the school year.  Glue these tags to the front of your brown paper bags and hand out the first week of school.  Don't forget to fill your own bags so students learn a little bit about you.  This is also a great opportunity to model for your class how to present their bags to the class.  As an added extension, use the bags as a writing prompt to learn about how to write a great paragraph or a longer 5 paragraph essay! 

Click HERE to get your free download of About Me Bags Tags!  

So there you have it!  8 Creative and clever uses for using paper bags in the classroom!  I hope that this post has inspired you to try at least one of these ideas this coming school year!  I know that I've inspired myself and I can't wait to see what other great ideas you all have for using this everyday item in new and interesting ways!

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Thanks for visiting and I hope you all have a GREAT Back to school!

Classroom DIY: Pioneer Journals

If you are anything like me, you are always in search of ways to keep your writers writing.  When I can integrate writing with another subject area, it is a win-win!  During our study of pioneer and The Oregon Trail, pioneer journals are fun way for students to use their creative brains, practice their narrative writing, and share what they are learning with others!

Every year, the fourth graders at my school participate in an Oregon Trail simulation.  Students are grouped in wagon trains groups, select a wagon master to lead them on their journey to Oregon, and buy supplies.

Wagon trains earn points which help them move along the trail.  As they move across the Oregon Trail map, they learn about the landforms, native people, and the dangers pioneers faced as they made the treacherous journey.

One of the ways students document their trials and tribulations along the trail is by writing in their pioneer journals.  This is a great way for students to practice narrative writing while learning about a history!

Before my students make their journals, we talk about how important the journals of the pioneers are to preserving history.  Much of what we know about pioneer life and the trip west we know because of these primary documents.   After that introduction, we get busy making our journals!

The materials you will need for making the journals are pretty easy to come by.

You will need a large paper bag for each student.  I just had students bring them from home.  You will also need yarn or twine, masking tape, a heavy duty hole punch.  An electric hole punch would work the best, but I have a two hole punch at school that I used.  It is heavy duty and works great!  My three hole punch works well too.  You'll see a picture of it a bit later.  The one shown above DOES NOT work well.  I'm not sure why I added it to the photo.  :)   For the journals you will also need either lined or unlined paper.  I gave my students a choice.  Each student will need 10 - 15 pages.

At some point, you will need your students' pioneer portraits.  On the day my class was building their journals, we held our photo shoot.  I photo edited (more on how to do this later in the post) and had the photos printed over the weekend so that we could finish our journals the next week.

The first thing your students will need to do is cut the bottom out of their bag.  Using a good pair of scissors, model for them how to cut down one corner crease and then around the bottom section of the bag.  When you are done, you will have one large section.  If your bags have handles, they can be used for a latch which I'll explain later.  

 Now for the fun (and LOUD) part!  In order to soften up the paper and make it easer to work with (and make it look and feel more like real rawhide) students will need to work their paper.  This means they will need to crinkle it up and smooth it out over and over and over and over and over again!  The more they work their paper, the more it breaks down the paper fibers and it gets softer and softer. This gets noisy!  I suggest having students carefully roll it up and then step on it, putting as much weight as possible.  They will need to be careful though.  The paper will rip pretty easily.

Once students are happy with the feel of their paper (or when you can't take the noise anymore) have students carefully smooth out their paper as much as they can.

Now students can either measure how big their covers will need to be or, how we did it, eyeball it!  

The paper should wrap around both the front and the back to make both covers.  In the end, the cover should be be one continuous piece that just gets folded.  This could be a great math lesson!  Students will need to trip their paper so that it isn't too much bigger than the paper it will hold.

When the covers have been trimmed, you will now need to hole punch them.  I suggest punching 4 - 5 holes.   

 This Swingline hole punch is adjustable with a little effort and I was able to punch 5 holes.

 In class, we used yarn that I had on hand to bind our books.  You could also use twine.

After journals are bound, have students title their journals.  Each of my students have pioneer names to go with their pioneer identities.  Students used Sharpie markers to write on their journals.  The Sharpie bled through the covers, so next year, I'm going to have to remember to plan for that.  

If you are adding Pioneer Portraits, each student will need to leave a large space in the middle of their journal for their picture.  

As a fun added element, students could put "latches" on their journals.  Some of our bags had handles and one of my students creatively came up with this ingenious way to keep her journal closed!

Using the handle pieces, she glued a small part in the front to make a loop.  and a larger piece in the back that wrapped around the side of the book and tucked through the loop on the front.

 I was pretty impressed!  This may become a regular addition to the pioneer journals in the future!

Now that the journals are done, let's talk about the Pioneer Portraits!

This year, I tried something a little different for our journals.  I included a Pioneer Portrait of each student.  They turned out amazing and were very easy to do.  All I used was my iPhone and a photo editing app called Snapseed.  

On our journal making day, I asked all students to bring clothing and props that we could use as part of our photo shoot.  Students brought hats, bonnets, vests, scarves, aprons, and more.  I put up a brown piece of butcher paper on the wall and each student stood in front of it as I took their photograph.  While I took the photographs, the rest of the students were working on their journals or getting dressed in their pioneer garb.

Once I had all of the photographs, and later that night, I sat down with my phone and worked on the photo editing.  Like I said, this was my first time doing this and I am no photo editing expert!  I'm going to share how I did it.  If you know of tricks and tips that would make the process better, please share them in the comments.  Actually, editing the photos wasn't painful at all.  Once I figured out the filters I wanted to use, it was just a matter of repeating the steps over and over again 28 times.

The first thing I did was open up the app Snapseed on my iPhone.

I opened a photo of one of my students...

 then I clicked on "FILTERS".

The first filter I chose was "BLACK & WHITE" and picked the "film" option.  This gave the photo a bit of a grainy look to it.

 The second filter I chose was "GRAINY FILM".  This added a bit more graininess to the photo.

The third filter I used was "VINTAGE".   This filter made the photo more brown, which is what I was wanting.

 The next step was "LENS BLUR".  This filter blurred out the edges of the photograph.

Finally, I opened the tools and chose "VIGNETTE".  

 This tool darkens the area around the subject of the photograph.

When it was all said and done, this is the beautiful photograph I ended up with.  It makes my heart happy!

When I was done editing all of the photographs, I sent them to Costco for printing.  They cost me about 17¢ each to print.  Well worth it!

The next week, I had a wonderful parent volunteer cut ovals in the front covers of all of my journals.

 We used this oval cutter by Fiskars, purchased specifically for this project!

Once the ovals were cut, the photos were added.  

 It was as simple as using masking tape and taping the portraits on the inside cover of each journal.

And here are the final results!  They turned out great and the students love them.

I think this would be a great project for any history class.  Almost any time period would make great material for a personal journal!  I can imagine Civil War and Revolutionary War diaries, Lewis and Clark journals, Civil Rights diaries (just to name a few)!

Since the events and language need to be historically accurate in the writing, journals and diaries written from the perspective of a historical figure or an imaginary person during an important time in history is a meaningful way for students to construct a deeper understanding of the past and share that understanding with others.

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If you are interested in more things "Pioneer", click HERE for my post on our annual Pioneer Day!  It's a day full of pioneer activities, crafts, food, and fun!

Thank you for visiting Literacy Loves Company!  If you have any questions about the project or ideas that would enhance it, please share in the comment section!  I'd love to hear from you.

End of the Year Awards

Click on the photo below to be taken straight to my TpT store and this resource!  

It is that weird time of year when some of us are spending out last days with our students and the others of us feel like the end of the year is still miles away.  Personally, I have 4 weeks left.

I'm trying to think of those 4 weeks as 19 days to make a lasting impact on the little brains I have in my class.  19 days to see their smiles, laugh at their jokes, and enjoy their company.  19 days to solidify fractions, make it to the end of the Oregon Trail, and finish up our last science and health units.  19 days!

I'm trying not to spend my thinking moments dreaming of sleeping in with no alarm clock, sipping hot coffee in my pjs on my deck, and enjoying lazy days puttering around in my yard... ahhh...  19 days.

But as I'm contemplating the end of the school year, I always come back to how much I love my class.  They are great kids.  They are funny.  They are smart.  They are caring.  They are unique.  I love them.  I started thinking about what I could do to send them off, that last day of school 19 days from now, with the knowledge that they are all of those things.

End of the Year Awards!  Yes!  That's it!

Okay...  I've been around long enough to know the end of the year drill...  crazy day!  Excitement, sadness, chaos, bags of supplies, papers shoved into backpacks,  and then everyone is gone and I'm standing in my classroom by myself surrounded by...  forgotten papers, pencils, and miscellaneous supplies.

I want my end of the year awards to be something that students will keep, will use, will see often.  Not just a piece of paper that will end up shoved into the bottom of a backpack.  So I came up with End of the Year Award Bookmarks!

I'm so happy with the end result:  54 Most Likely To...  Bookmarks.  Each bookmark has a different graphic.  A few of the awards are the same, but with a female and a male image.

Some of the awards are open to interpretation, which I love!  It gives the teacher flexibility when choosing awards for students.  For example...
•Most Likely to "Find the Evidence" could be a reflection on a students curiosity, love of mysteries, or ability to locate evidence in a text.
•Most Likely to "Knock it out of the Park" could be referring to a students baseball hitting ability or it could refer to the cliche and reflect on a students ability to do much better than expected on a project, assignment, life, etc.

•The bookmarks are editable, so it makes it easy to personalize for students.

•With over 50 bookmarks, you might think it may be difficult to plan and organize your awards, but I've included 3 planning pages.  The planning pages include all 54 bookmarks with space to write students' names before you begin personalizing the book marks and printing.

For a free sample of the End of the Year Bookmark Awards (an un-editable version), click on the image below!

If you are interested in the full resource, please click HERE to visit Literacy Loves Company on TpT!  

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Thank you for visiting!  I hope your last days of school are full of ah-ha moments, smiles, and enjoyable moments!