Global Awareness Project in 2nd Grade

Grade: 2
Teachers: Laura Wetmore and Cathy Wolinsky
Subjects: Reading, Writing, Social Studies
Project Name: FlatConnections - Building Bridges to Tomorrow in Grades K-2
Resources: FlatConnections Project

Once again we have a classroom participating in a global project communicating and collaborating with students across the U.S. and in some international settings. This year Laura Wetmore is participating with her class and they are posting to the project wiki. All classrooms are posting a multimedia greeting (called a "handshake") and a View from Our Window project. The project schools are divided into three working groups to collaborate on a topic, this year the topics will be Sharing Stories and Celebrations. Teachers are communicating via. email as well as a project "ning" and students are using Google Earth to "travel" to the various locations. This is an example of a project that meets the new Global Awareness theme of the updated Social Studies Framework.

This is a map of the schools in the project.

Fourth grade Book Group makes a Movie

Grade: 4
Teacher: Rosie Lenehan
Subject: Social Studies/Reading
Project Name: Biography

The Marvelous Munchkin book club recently read a biography of Harriet Tubman.  As they discussed Harriet Tubman in one of their meetings, they arrived at the conclusion that when she was alive, Harriet Tubman was relatively unknown.  They were troubled by the lack of recognition that she got when she was alive, especially given all that she did.  We talked about the reasons for this and we also talked about how it is that people become famous.  I gave them some options for individual or group projects they could do around the idea of making Harriet Tubman famous, and they decided to work together on a newscast.  This is entirely student-written, student-filmed, and student-edited, completed in about 2 hour-long blocks.  Also, it was done entirely using an iPad!  Enjoy!

(cross posted at http://room301classpage.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-club-project.html)

Grade 1 iPads

Grade: 1
Teacher: Heather Boutin
Subject: All
Project Name: iPads for Learning Pilot in First Grade

What incredibly exciting news!  I am sure that many of you have caught wind that our classroom now has some new technology - the first grade team was awarded a grant from the Yarmouth Education Foundation and each first grade classroom now has two iPads and the Yarmouth school department gave us new projectors and other equipment necessary to make the iPad a useful tool in the classroom.  This technology has really opened our classroom up to a whole new world of learning! 

As you can imagine, the students are ecstatic!  We are in the exploring phase of the iPads and we are learning how to successfully integrate them into our classrooms.  Students will be using the iPad in our listening center to read along with picture books and they will also be exposed to a couple of games that support our spelling instruction.  We have been using the iPad as a tool in math and handwriting lessons and I am very excited to find many more ways to incorporate the iPads!
 (cross posted at  http://boutin105.blogspot.com/2012/01/ipads.html)

Readers' Theater Performance Videos

Grade: 3

Teacher: Kate Parkin

Subject: Language Arts

Project Name: Reader's Theater

Resources: Class Blog Post