About Me Books To Share At Parent Teacher Conferences

I started fifth grade off a little differently this year, which was both good and bad.  Good because it made me think about each step along the way more than usual.  Bad because later I went to grab their sketchbooks and realized we never started them (I hadn't even copied them).  But it's all working out.
We started the first art class with some brainstorming about themselves.  What do they like? What questions (about anything) do they have?  What are their goals.  Then each student got a piece of 12 x 12" white  paper that we folded into fourths. They drew some things like right now in two squares diagonal from each other, and free painted in the other two squares:

The next page in this project was their names, drawn block style, and colored with neon crayons (again, the 12 x 12 paper was folded into fourths):

The two squares are intentionally left blank.

The final page was a 12 x 12 piece of construction paper we collaged with goals for our future.  One fourth was for home goals, one for goals with friends/relationships, one for goals for school/academic, and the final one was personal goals. About half way through I was really wishing I had a broader selection of magazines, because the going got rough there for a while finding images that fit student goals.

Close up of some school goals.

The final step was to glue the three pages together and fold along the diagonal.

The first and last pages were folded artwork sides out, the middle was folded blank/back side showing:

Name side folded in. You can see the backwards fold line
in this photo for the first page.

So at the end it's a neat little 6 x 6 bundle, and we added a cover with marker.  Here's a video of it unfolding (thanks to a co-teacher for being the model):

I did give them to the fifth grade teachers to hand back during parent teacher conferences because I couldn't figure out a good way to display them. My goal was for them to have a little snapshot of themselves as fifth graders for their future (and also to get them thinking about their future goals, Leader in Me style).