1.6 – Portfolio (4 min video)

Transcript

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>> Well, I’m going to take some time right now to walk you through the portfolio assignment. Portfolio assignment is something I’ve had my students in the classroom do for years, and it’s basically like a scrapbook. It’s essentially a visual representation of everything we’re studying in the history class. It’s basically a way to show what the lessons are about. So for this assignment, which is weekly, or whenever you complete one of the lessons, you’ll want to include several things. You’ll want to include on the top of the page, for example, the lesson title. You’ll also want to include somewhere on the page, and it can be whatever font you want and however big you want it to be, but you’ll want to include a quote. It might be a quote from one of the characters we’ve talked about that week. It might be a Bible verse, or maybe something of poetry, for example, that relates to what we’ve talked about. But then, besides the title and the quote, the kind of the heart and the soul of the portfolio project, are typically you’ll have five different items. Usually, most of my students will print things from online. So it might be photographs, it might be paintings or artworks, but something that shows the characters in the events that we’ve talked about that week. You might also include maps. You might include an excerpt from a great work of literature. You might include even something like a news article or something like song lyrics that directly relate to whatever we’ve talked about. Now I’ve had students who will print things online and then they’ll cut and they’ll paste them neatly on the page. I’ve had students go through magazines and find things. I’ve also had students find imagery online and then arrange it graphically online as well or through some kind of graphic design program and then print that out.

If you don’t wanna necessarily do that, there’s a whole ‘nother option you can do, which my students also like to do, and that is to create an original artwork. So if you love to draw, if you love to sketch or paint, this might be the way to go for you. So you might choose a single character from that week, or a single event, or a single piece of artwork, or maybe architecture, and then draw that or paint that.

Still include a lesson title, still include a quote, but then it’s kind of this nice one item artwork. In terms of these finished entries, ’cause you’ll be doing one a week, you wanna put them in something. Some of my students will take a nice bound hardcover sketchbook, and they’ll just make their entries in each page as they go along. Some of my students will get a scrapbook and then they’ll insert pages for each week or they may do the same with a binder. You just wanna use something that looks good, something that has high quality to it, and you also want to use high quality paper, something that’s thicker, maybe like cardstock or some kind of quality art paper like Bristol board, for example. Not only do you wanna pick good images and print them well or draw them well, you’re going to do that, but you also want to arrange them well. You really want to focus on the design of the page and to that end you want to fill up the page. There shouldn’t be a lot of blank space on the page. Sometimes it’s helpful when you cut out a picture, for example, to mount it to a piece of colored card stock or even construction paper and make a cut out a larger border around it and then paste that to the entry.

Whatever the case is, you want to craft this one with a great interest to overall design. Typically these are graded based upon their completeness. Did you follow directions? Did you include all the parts, all the items you need to include? And I usually grade them as well or your teacher will grade them based upon how well crafted and how well designed they are. I hope you enjoy this one.