Kids create self-portraits using proportions devised from data collection of their daily habits--a VERY fun project for the teacher and the students!

This is one of my FAVORITE in-class projects! It spans about 2 days, maybe more, depending on how long you want them to work in class. The students do some data collection, based on activities they perform every day such as listening to music, sleeping, eating, doing chores, etc. Then we compile class averages. Each task corresponds to a feature on the human face, and then the students re-draw that face based on thier daily habits. For example, the mouth corresponds to how many hours a day that person spends eating. If your number is above the class average, your mouth is enlarged by the scale factor you create. If you eat less than the class average, your mouth will be smaller. I did this with 7th graders and they absolutely LOVED it! I hung up all of the faces in the hallway, and the students had a ball with it, examining each other's and saying "Wow, Emil spends so much time watching TV every day, look how big his left eyebrow is!" It was surely a conversation starter for people in the hallway. If a kid didn't do ANY chores at home, then he was missing an ear, or some other feature. My kids really loved this activity. There is a lot of teacher-guided and teacher-led data collection and processing though, so you need patience and good class management to complete this project successfully! If you do this one, please let me know how it works for you! Oh yeah, don't let the kids know what the outcome is going to be...you don't want them to fudge their data! So, give them the first page of this packet first, let them wonder, and then spring the rest of it on them! It is very helpful to make some copies of the chart and of the generic face for the overhead. I found my kids understood what to do much easier when I did an example for them first. They also needed some help getting started on figuring out how to fill out their chart on page 2--but once we did an example, even my lowest functioning kids were able to do this project with ease!