The Creative Classroom

Using Costumes to Improve Student Reading Skills

By Karen Fleming

 Home

How To Use Costumes

How to Organize Your Costumes

Where To Get Costumes

Lesson Plans

Links

Final Site Review 

Purpose

This site is designed for teachers looking for creative hands on ways to teach secondary students. The information in this site can be used by both English and Social Studies teachers. The teaching tool outlined here is the use of costumes in a classroom as curriculum. Using costumes can improve reading and writing abilities. This is a concept I have worked on for the past seven years. I tried to give information about using costumes as well as lesson plans that teachers could use right away.

Design

I chose a simple design for this site. I have a lot of information to pass on and didn't want it cluttered with a complicated design or too many graphics. I did decide to include a few pictures as examples of how much fun this tool can be. I also included sample pictures to show how to organize the costumes. I used simple colors that do not distract from the purpose. The links on the left follow throughout the site letting the user know at all times where they are. I wanted to make it easy to navigate and get back to the home page.

Problems encountered

One major problem I encountered was trying to work from both an Apple and a PC computer. My files were corrupting between the two machines. I solved this by having my software loaded onto my iBook to work from there only.

The second problem I had was getting the digital camera software and hardware to work on my iBook. Some of the pictures I was hoping to load onto my pages could not be used because we couldn't pull them up. The decision was made to not add them. I felt that the graphics I had were enough.

The third problem was getting my links on the left to work. They did not take the user to the sites intended. To solve this I had to go back through the pages one at a time and relink them.