The Volcano - If you give a teacher a project...

A collaborative language project originally developed by Jeff Peach, Jim Richards and Chuck Nat.

Go right to the instructions for MS Word or MS PowerPoint

This is a project that teaches grammar and writing with the aid of a visual stimulation.  We call it the Volcano Project only because the first picture we used came from the Open Court 6th grade program, a picture of Vesuvius erupting. Since then it has evolved into many different projects.

Here are the basic concepts:

• Inspire students to write in any form, sentences, paragraphs, poetry...
• Learn grammar.
• Inspire creative story writing.
• Students remain in control as they create the project on their own computer.

Originally we did this with a program called HyperStudio.  It can easily be adapted on PowerPoint and we have been also using MS Word to build because of the powerful spell checker within Word.

This is the first template we used.  This was placed in a location that every student could open (on a server?).

The students then filled in the columns starting with nouns, then describing the nouns (adjectives), give the nouns some action and then either adverbs, similes, prepositional phrases or whatever the teacher was teaching at the time.

It would then look like this.