Melina Cundari teaches English to five to ten year olds at a primary school in Sicily, in a small town with a struggling economy. Pricey e-learning software and graphic design suites were never an option on her school's budget, and more writing exercises were never going to hold a room full of hands-on learners. So she handed them a design tool instead. Her students have been building posters in PosterMyWall for years now, and the first thing they asked after finishing one was whether they could make another.
Her method is simple enough to copy. She connects her computer to the classroom board and builds a design from scratch while the class watches, showing how to pick a background, add a photo, and change the fonts and colors. Before she sets any task, she logs in and makes the design herself to check that a ten year old can finish it. Then the students work in pairs on tablets, arguing over which image says the thing they mean. Topics have run from Pancake Day to citizenship and the environment.
You can work the same way with a smaller format. A bookmark is the shortest version of that assignment: one image, one line of text, and a finished thing a child can carry home in a book. Set a reading challenge on the back, print a class set on one sheet of cardstock, and hand them out as prizes. Browse school design templates or educational templates for a starting point, then shrink one to bookmark size.
Read further: Here's how an educator enriched her online classroom's learning experience with PosterMyWall