Listen. Connect. Empower.

Hour of Code took a fabulous turn this year when I observed my students moving to the "beats" they created.  By the end of one 5th grade class I had, you could find students reading and rapping to the beats they created. This took off and spread like wildfire throughout the 3rd-5th grade.  Our journey follows. I began this December as I usually do - investigating the new Hour of Code activities.  I highlighted ones that I thought my students would enjoy that are timely: Minecraft Designer Star Wars Moana Code an emoji Beats - Made with Code I always give them options to use several of my favorite apps Kodable LightBot We began Hour of Code the week following a fabulous winter concert.  With so much music in our veins, I demonstrated how to use Beats and decided to see where this would take us.  Within 10 minutes 85% of 3rd-5th grade classes were grooving to their own beats.  To one particular 5th grade student I suggested he grab a...

This week wraps up our Global Read Aloud project by writing a final letter to our new friends and finding out the results of our voting. The big question was "Who won?" so we started there. 1st and 2nd graders were in agreement about the winning book, Troublemaker . 2nd grade results 1st grade results I created an Animoto to reflect on our experiences:    To conclude our collaboration we wrote a final letter to our new friends: Dear Friends, We have exciting news.  We have a new student.  She just moved back here from Florida!  We have more exciting news, about our vote.  In the second grade, Troublemaker got 66.7% of the votes and won for favorite book.   Twenty Yawns and Nana in the City tied for second place with 11.1% of the votes. We are full of exciting news.  Our class won the Golden Sneaker award.  That means that our class earned many points for good behavior in gym.  (It’s not reall...

Last class we counted yawns and tallies.  This week we are counting votes.  We began by reading our final two Lauren Castillo books, Next, students voted for their favorite Lauren Castillo book. After voting, students selected an activity.  Each station had a book and related activity:   Twenty Yawns - What was your favorite part? Troublemaker - If I were writing a book, I would make my troublemaker a... Yard Sale - What is one thing that you would not sell? Students responded to these questions on pieces of bulletin board paper and I hung their work up where we line up to exit so that students could see their work and the thoughts of others.

This week's Global Read Aloud activity has us counting - yawns and tallies.  First, we began by reading Twenty Yawns by Jane Smiley and illustrated by Lauren Castillo. We counted all of the "yawns" and made sure there were 20.  Check. Next, we watched the videos that we created and the ones our buddy classrooms made for us about what we are reading.  Last week I took pictures of students and the books they were checking out.  I created an Animoto and we shared these.  Our buddies did the same and we watched these.  Students watched and made tallies of the books that they had read.  Our final activity was to count the tallies.  Sharing our reading was a great way to generate interest in other books.

This was week 3 of our Global Read Aloud partnership.  We began by returning to the letter we wrote to our partner class.  We answered any questions they asked us (as a comment in the google doc). Next, we read The Reader by Amy Hest and illustrated by Lauren Castillo .  One first grade class noticed that the boy looked very similar to the boy in Nana in the City and wondered if it could be the same child.   I posed this question to Lauren Castillo on Twitter and she graciously responded: Together, the first graders then brainstormed the places that we could read:  Second graders wrote about a book they liked and why. After checking books out, I took students' pictures with their book selections to add to the Animoto I was creating to send to our partner class.  

This week we compared and contrasted our community with the community of our new friends in Clarendon Hills, IL.  We watched the video that we created, followed by the video that they created.  We were watching for 3 things: Something we have in common Something that is different A question that we have Students worked in groups to identify these items then shared back to the class. I compiled our reflections in a letter to our buddy class that we shared with them. This set the stage for the next interaction - reading our letters again and responding to questions.

Our Global Read Aloud project this year was a collaboration between my 1st and 2nd graders and Becky Swanson's 1st and 2nd graders in Clarendon Hills, Illinois.  This project was over a year in the making.  I met Becky at NerdCamp in 2015 and we reconnected at NerdCamp 2016 where we decided to work together to have shared learning experiences between our students.  Excited about sharing Lauren Castillo work we began to plan. My students began by brainstorming what a community was: Next we read Nana in the City  like our new friends and divided into groups to describe what our community is like for our new friends.   We described our Weather (what it is like in the summer and the winter) Town (how we get around, important places and people) Sports (local sports teams) Geography (proximity to bodies of water, mountains, large cities) School life (name of school, grades attending, how we get there, the best thing about it) Groups shared t...

In our final week on the topic of "leadership" students were asked to view each other's work and think critically about it.  Students scanned a QR code and viewed all of the completed infographics .  Their job was to read critically and identify one that they agreed with and one that they disagreed with and provide their reasoning. While most students could easily identify a character and defense they agreed with, it was much more challenging for them to find one to disagree with.  The most common "leader" they disagreed with Greg Heffley. Now our project and our elections season is complete.  We read, shared ideas, worked independently or in small groups, wrote, created infographics, and thought critically about them.