Overview
- Get students to locate a thought-provoking quote about a topic, theme, or by a person related to the current topic of study using a tool such as BrainyQuote.
- Get them to turn these into posters using a website such as Canva.
- Display one poster per week on your classroom door as a ‘thought for the week’.
Case Study
As a development this year of my study unit on “Who is your history hero?”, I got my students to locate a thought-provoking quote by or about their chosen character, or alternatively a quote about one of the ‘heroic’ qualities which they identified (determined, creative, principled and so on). There are plenty of such quotes available in searchable websites such as BrainyQuote.
Next, students used the free service at Canva to turn their quote into a poster. My intention is to rotate the best posters as a “Thought for the week” display on my classroom door.
Taking it further
Students could be encouraged to provide an observation on the quote by leaving a block of post-it notes nearby. These can then be turned into follow-up quotes from the students themselves so that the “quote of the week” turns into an ongoing conversation. I’ve started doing this with the ‘quote of the week’ outside my own classroom after one of our students wrote a post-it note in reply to a Martin Luther King quote, and I then turned this into the following week’s poster:
As an extension activity, students could research the author of the quote and provide a brief biographical summary as part of the poster and a web link / QR code with further information. These biographical summarise could be given focus with suggested topic sentences (“Thomas Edison was a ….. / I regard him as a heroic figure because… / I particularly like this quote because…”). In the example image below, you’ll see that some of the authors of the quotes are clearly worth further research in their own right!
Examples from Y9 students at the International School of Toulouse
