Saturday, March 27, 2010

What Is A Community?

My class has been fortunate enough to be involved in this amazing Community Project that allowed my students to connect with other students from the United States and even India. All of us shared information about our communities, asked questions about the other communities, and ultimately defined "a community." Involvement in this project really benefitted my students and made this Social Studies topic a lot more concrete and far more exciting: it made it real. I also got the opportunity to connect with some amazing educators including @jgriffith2, @mcarls, @dgrice, @amsgoodwin, @atkauffman, @JillKathleen, @kditzler, and so many more! A special thank you to @jgriffith2 for including us in this amazing project and putting together the final slideshow too. It looks great!

What do you think of this project? After viewing the slideshow, does your definition of "a community" change? How? Please leave a comment here and let me know.

Happy viewing!
Aviva

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Progressive Story Project Video

Thanks to @kditzler, my class is involved in the Progressive Story Project. We are writing a short story with four other classes: one in Virginia, two in Texas, and one in Pennsylvania. My class got to write the second paragraph in the story. We wrote the paragraph together as a class, and then the students worked on their own to draw the picture cues to accompany the text. Below is a slideshow that my students made of their pictures for this story. Looking at these pictures and what we wrote, what do you think might happen next in the story? Please leave us a comment here and let us know. We can't wait to read what the next class writes!

Miss Dunsiger's Class

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Community Project Google Wave



Today I got a chance to participate in the Google Wave that was taking place as part of the Community Project. Many of the different schools involved in the Community Project contributed to this wave. It was interesting to hear about the similarities and differences between these communities.

Since we're off on March Break this week, I knew that my students couldn't participate, but I wanted to give them the "live" experience. I used the SMART Recorder to record part of the Google Wave (see the video above or click on this link to view it in a bigger window). Once we get back to school next week, I'll go into the Google Wave with my class, and we can read what the other schools said and contribute some more ideas too. I'm interested in hearing what my class thinks about this tool when they're not "waving" in real time. Will the students like it as much? Why do they feel this way? I will definitely be sharing their thoughts with you!

After watching this recording though, please let me know what you think about this Google Wave experience. What do you like about it? Is there anything that you wish was or was not a component of Google Wave? I would love to hear your thoughts!

Thanks to @mcarls and @jgriffith2 for making this Community Project Google Wave such a success today! I'm glad that I could take part in it!

Aviva

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Animoto Video on Latest Round of Literacy and Math Centres

This is an Animoto video of the students completing the latest round of literacy and math centres. Watch this video with your children and talk to them about what centres they enjoyed the most and why. You can also talk to them about what they learned at each of these centres. I would love to hear about what your children learned too: comments are definitely welcome.

Have a great March Break!
Aviva

Friday, March 12, 2010

Flat Stanley Video

This is a video of the Grade 1 classes opening up the Flat Stanley letter from Mrs. Adams' class. Her class is recording a video of opening up our letter. We can't wait to see their video too!

From,

The Grade 1 Students and Teachers

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Math Homework Wallwisher

For our weekly math homework, we are trying to expose the students to some different online tools that they can use to share their learning with others. Wallwisher is one of our favourite tools. In this post, we embedded the Wallwisher activity that the students completed for homework on March 3rd. Thank you all for contributing to this Wallwisher! Try reading through some of the comments that others left here and discuss these comments with your children. Your children can also add another sticky note to this Wallwisher: sharing more information that they are learning in class!