Global Read Aloud - Our Community #GRA16

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:

Made with Padlet

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 their responses and I recorded these and compiled them into a short video to send to our new friends.  Next class would begin with these videos and a comparison of our communities.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Reading Identity: Who am I as a reader?

Image
This lesson was about making a visual representation of our reading selves.  We drew, we laughed, we learned about each other as readers, and started building a reading community.  We did this on a remote day.  *This was developed in conjunction with my brilliant colleagues.* Standards:  AASL: Inquire/Share I.C.1 . Interacting with content presented by others. I decided we needed a theme to tie a disjointed year together and settled on the question:  I spent much of my summer thinking about "identity" but needed a concrete landing place for those big, abstract thoughts.  I wondered what would happen if we thought about "identity" through a reading lens. We read Reading Makes You Feel Good We practiced looking at two options and showing our choice for where we like to read by holding up that number of fingers. Next, we moved on to our directed draw. When we were done drawing, we had a big reveal.  Students were tasked with looking for someone with a similar piece of
Read more

Books as mirrors and windows (with sticky notes & reflections)!

Image
Every year I examine books as mirrors and windows with my students.  Every year I tweak the exploration and this year was no different.  This year's additions included sticky notes and reflections.   Day 1: Mirror moments Sticky notes I created with Tony Vincent's template (link below) After modeling mirror moments (and having students make "me too" signals), students identified a mirror moment from a stack of books at their table.  "This is like my sister and I.  We fight all the time." - 3rd grader "When my mom tells me to clean my room I just sit because I don't know where to start." - 3rd grader Day 2: Window moments In the next class I modeled "window moments" and we drew windows in the air when we heard moments that were "not like us."   Students identified "window moments" at their tables with sticky notes. Students shared their "window moments" through the window we passed around our sharing circl
Read more

Circulation Policies in our Library

Image
Developing relationships with students and families is my priority. I want them to have what they need from our library, but I also want (and need) them to respect our library and other students and return books so others can borrow them. Lost books are a reality. We lose MANY of them (too many of them) because it isn't something I spend much time or energy dwelling on. My hope is that the "lost" book has found its way into a home and is being loved there. However, this is something that has been increasingly on my mind. This past summer I read Rebeka Barringer's Knowledge Quest article  “How Inclusive and Human-First Circulation Policies & Practices Can Impact a Child’s Relationship with Elementary Library Spaces” (Nov/Dec 2022) and it spoke to me. It made me think about the language used to communicate with families student buy-in (or lack thereof) in the circulation of books I decided on action items for this year to address lost books: Help students underst
Read more