Who doesn’t love S’mores?

Our tech team sends out weekly suggestions for new programs to try out and one of the ideas several weeks ago was Smore which is a free online tool that can be used to create flyers that can be published.  I’ve used this site a few times now as a reading response activity with my little friends and the more I use it the more ideas I think of for the classroom!

Common Core Alignment:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.K.3 With prompting and support, identify characters, settings, and major events in a story.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.1.3 Describe characters, settings, and major events in a story, using key details.

You can set up a free account and set your privacy settings to your choice based on what you want “the world” to see or not. After doing that, you can start a new flyer- I do this step myself, but eventually my students will be able to do this themselves- when doing this, you are selecting your background, fonts and overall layout (I select the “other” category since the other options (sale, event, business) haven’t applied yet). I had my students select the background and colors after we completed our content for the flyer.  Our focus was characters and setting for our stories, so I just added a few simple questions into the flyer and then my students filled in the answers to the questions after I was done reading the story.

While I read the story to them, my little friends drew pictures of the characters and setting, which we then took pictures of (on my mac or on the iPad) and pulled into the flyer afterward.

Some other ways I hope to use Smore in the future: reading response- character study, book recommendations- “You should read this book if you like…”, main events/story sequence, etc.  I also would love to have each student create an “All About Me” poster as a getting to know you activity at the beginning of the year, or use this as a way to invite parents to Open House!