Your Deeds Are Your Monuments
A Research and Reflection Project that invites students to integrate learning, creativity, and symbolism as they explore how actions become legacies.
In Wonder, R.J. Palacio writes, “Your deeds are your monuments.” This idea is at the heart of this BOB project, which invites students to explore the life of a famous person whose actions have made a meaningful difference.
Students research a person of their choice and identify at least five key things they learned about their life, values, and impact. They then design and create a monument that symbolizes those discoveries and communicates a key message they want others to take away about that person’s legacy.
While this project can easily be implemented as a whole-class assignment to complement a biography unit or a read-aloud of Wonder, it becomes a Building Outside the Blocks (BOB) project when designed for student autonomy and self-direction. In the BOB format, students work on their project independently at home, choose their own subject, and present on a personalized timeline within a shared class schedule.
The BOB approach is both a mindset and a structure. It consistently uses personalizing, time-released, student-centered projects to build skill, autonomy, community, and connection. Students learn from and with one another as each presentation brings a new voice, perspective, and monument to the classroom conversation.
To build schema for this project before it is introduced, students would explore a variety of monuments and deliberate their meaning without doing research. They would have a gallery of monuments to ponder and extract what they think they are about and what it say about the subject. This entry point is a key lesson for students to understand that that monuments are more than structures; they are stories in stone (or other materials), symbolizing the values, actions, and impact of the people they honour. A key outcomes is for them to discover that meaning is made through observation, interpretation, and symbolism, the same process they will use to create their own monuments.
Here is a gallery of a few images that I kept from this project:
Can you guess for whom these monuments were constructed? This was a BOB from 2017. From left to right: Me to We: Finding Meaning in a Material World by Marc and Craig Kielburger, I am Malala, Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson, and The Diary of Anne Frank.
Key Outcomes:
Builds research, synthesis, and presentation skills
Encourages critical and creative thinking through symbolic design
Promotes empathy, character education, and reflection on legacy
Strengthens student voice, choice, and agency within curriculum expectations
Students learn from each other, building community through the exchange of ideas, inspiration, and symbolic expression
The decision of who to read and create about is a personal one, driven by a student’s interests, goals, and what they find inspiring. There is no single correct answer, as the subject can be drawn from a wide variety of sources, making it a flexible and personalized process that spans different genres, time periods, and geographical locations.
