I try to keep it positive but do like to use this as a learning opportunity for speaking in front of an audience, which is a great lifelong skill to have. When this homework is due (a few days before the Wax Museum) each child recites the speech in front of the whole class. The kids take this home and create a short speech to give for the Wax Museum Day when someone pushes their button. I give the kids a handout with a sample speech written on it and we talk about what makes a good speaker, like eye contact, posture, voice volume and confidence. Homework: Memorizing Speeches and Gathering Costumes Besides printed out pictures and drawings, we also glue on a button (a piece of paper) that says ‘Push here to hear about this famous American.” 6. On the Wax Museum day, the child will be standing in front of this backdrop, in costume, portraying the person he/she studied. Each child decorates his/her backdrops with the homework pictures of the famous person studied, as well as a hand-drawn background. These backdrops are made from butcher paper (five and a half feet long) and can be any color, but I tend to use white. I tell the kids to take off their shoes (which they LOVE), because we don’t want our backdrops to get dirty from our shoes. We head to the gym for this project because we need lots of room to spread out. I used to give the kids a choice to write or to type, but since keyboarding skills are part of the testing requirements, I figured it would give them good practice AND it is so much easier to read for grading. Luckily, our school is in an area where almost everyone has computer access. When the rough draft is done, the kids take them home to type. We focus on doing a page each day so it’s not too overwhelming.
#WAX MUSEUM HOW TO#
Writing the Reports in ClassĪfter a lesson on organizing notes in time sequence and how to “be the author” and tell the story well, the kids are ready to write their rough drafts. The checking of the notes is quick but helps me know who needs to dig a little deeper to get ready to write.
I learned early on that if there is no due date when it’s time to write, I’ll have ten kids who can’t write because they need more notes. The kids have several weeks to gather information, either at home or at school and then I have a due date for the notes to be checked. Researching and Taking Notesīefore we start researching, we go over how to take notes (and not write whole sentences) and then I give the kids a research handout with specific categories to add notes to. Once they find a book and check in with me to be sure we don’t have any duplicates, I tell them to take the book home and to read their biography as part of their required reading homework. My rules are that the person must have been an American (5th grade studies American history, so it reinforces that), must have been an admirable person and have contributed something positive (no outlaws/criminals), must be dead or near-dead (they always laugh at this rule but I just want to avoid having biographies of 30 year olds), must have been some kind of groundbreaker if he/she is a sports figure or an entertainer (Jackie Robinson is good but Michael Jordan isn’t).įinally, the kids need to be able to find an actual book about that person, because I want them to read an entire story about them before they catch snippets of him/her on the internet. The kids know my criteria for selecting a famous person to study, but of course, you can come up with your own requirements. When we get there, I pull sticks to see who gets to look for their famous person biography first.
#WAX MUSEUM FULL#
Choosing a Famous Person and Finding a Biographyįirst, we go to the library and I take my trusty cup full of Popsicle sticks with the kid’s names on them. So, exactly how do we put together a Wax Museum? Here are the steps: 1.
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