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.



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