Thinking of new classroom projects for your high school students? A classroom teacher has this advantage over other teachers: the opportunity to further inspire and influence their students, as they are their immediate advisor, friend, and mentor. By facilitating meaningful classroom projects, they allow students to take on additional responsibilities, learn new things, interact better, and have fun. So instead of the usual fundraising activities and projects, why not try something more inspiring? Here are some ideas that you can implement in your class.
INSPIRATIONAL POSTERS
Encourage your students to inspire other students, to give them food for the soul. You can do this by asking them to design and create posters with inspirational quotes about life that they can find or make themselves. Ask them to add even simple graphics or illustrations to amplify the message given. They can post these posters at school to serve as words of motivation and encouragement.
INSPIRATION ARTICLES
Your students may also want to use inspirational quotes to decorate various items that they sell at school to other students and even teachers as a fundraising project for their class. For example, they can design and create homemade cards and bookmarks with inspirational quotes. They can also hand paint plain white shirts with these quotes, along with matching designs. If they have capital for this small business, they can also choose to make t-shirt designs on the computer and print them on the t-shirts. Subsequently, it would be good to suggest that they also make appropriate advertising and promotional flyers and/or posters to publicize these items for sale.
Also, have your students wear the t-shirts themselves when selling these things. Imagine seeing a schoolmate wearing a flashy shirt that seems to scream a message of inspiration!
INSPIRING CONTEST
How about letting other students from the school of different levels join in on the fun? Perhaps your class can plan and facilitate a drawing, painting, or writing contest to interpret a given quote! This can even be done weekly! They will have to create the mechanics and promotional materials. They can give tokens as prizes and also certificates for the winners. Also, you can ask the editors of the school newspaper to announce and publish the winners’ works. In this way, your class project can become a whole school activity. And at the same time, your students can also communicate with their peers and touch their lives!
So, what are you waiting for? Use your class periods now to start planning the project that you think will best benefit your students. Better yet, you can let them vote on which one they would like to make. It would also be good to divide them into groups and have each one do something different. Just be sure to help them in the planning and implementation. It may be your class’s inspiring project series. Good luck and enjoy!
