Action

August 22, 2015
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Student-created animal documentary

Posted by | Action, iPad, PYP, Student Created Content, Technology | No Comments

 “I don’t really like writing,” said one of my particularly uninhibited students towards the end of last year, “no one ever sees it… it doesn’t seem very important.” At the ripe old age of 6 this student constantly surprises me and today she really hit the nail of the head. We are constantly giving our students work and tasks that have a acutely limited audience and little real world significance. For our second last unit of 14-15 school year we made an iBook of student created documentaries on animals they were interested in an attempt to combat this early elementary apathy.

Students worked with me in pairs or independently on their documentary. The first assessment of the project was to draw a picture of their animal making sure to include as many details as they could. Then after a short group discussion the students searched for information to answer a short list of generic questions the class had agreed on. The first few questions required simple responses while as the last two were more open ended, allowing for differentiation according to student ability. Students search for information within books from our school Learning Commons (collated by our Teacher Librarian) and also from a few websites with age appropriate content curated on a Pinterest Board I put together.

Students wrote answers to the questions and this became the second assessment of the project. Student then participated in a teacher conference about their ‘script’ and how they would divide it up for each group member when necessary etc.

Students then search Creative Commons images from Flickr.com to illustrate their script. We used the Typic app to brand each image with the Creative Commons logo and link to the image on Flickr.com.
Even though this took longer than I would of liked – the discussion around academic honesty and digital integrity was fantastic.

It is a little late but it is now published on the iTunes store, for free. We hope you like it and if you would like to leave any comments we would be very excited to receive them.

March 15, 2015
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Student-initiated Action

Posted by | Action, PYP, Who We Are | No Comments

When our Librarian gave me this book it was just one of many in a pile of resources; books about caring for little sisters, being kind to friends at school, and helping older people… All important topics and the students did enjoy them but… then I pulled out “Boxes for Katje” by Candace Fleming.

We are in our fourth unit based on the transdisciplinary theme of “Who We Are” from the PYP curriculum framework. Our central idea is “Families and other groups work together to care for and serve each other.”

Read-alouds are an important part of our inquiry process and we try to have at least one per day. I read and the students doodle so that their hands don’t distract their ears from listening.

I read the book to the class and was not interrupted once. I closed the last page and place the book on the ground.

“You are all so quiet, what are you thinking” I casually asked by first grade class.

“We should do something for the Dutch!” (Hannah)

“Uhhhmmm, I think the Dutch are okay now, this story is set before your grandma’s where even born,” I said.

“We should do something though” (Jeana)

“What about that Lady you met… from Africa… she might need help” (Joshua)

“It was at the teacher meeting (conference)… Mrs Martin… she lives in Ethiopia.” (Hannah)

“We should send something to her.” (Jeans)

So the students decided to make and sell cookies during recess. They made posters, cookies, made a banner, asked that it be in announcements, and sold the cookies.

At two cookies for W1000 ($1) we made W248000!

The money is going to Mrs Martin in Ethiopia to buy school supplies for a sister Ethiopian school down the road from her international school. Her class actually just gave this school a supplies set for each child and our donation will pay for supplies for all next year!

So proud of them!