Project Based Learning Update!

I've been neglecting my blogging with the whirlwind of activities going on at school.  From speech festival and the Remembrance Day service to professional development days and report card writing, it's been a busy couple of weeks for this Grade 1 teacher!  A LOT has been happening in our classroom, but one of the most exciting things I'd like to share tonight is an update on our project based learning.

As you may have read, we did a brainstorming session with Mrs. Caldwell's Kindergartens early this year to help us decide what our focus would be for project learning this year.   We narrowed our topics down to "helping farmers" and "helping cats", with the Grade 1s most interested in farming and the Kindergartens most interested in cats.  So much learning and meaningful work has taken place since then!

Students decided one way we could help farmers would be to show our appreciation and to give farmers a break from the hard work they do!  This led to a plan for Farmer Appreciation Day, which students will be hosting later this month.  I don't want to "spoil" the details for any of our blog readers who are attending, but I do want to share some of the great things we've been up to in preparation for this big event!

As a shared writing activity, I helped students write invitations to send to local farmers and posters to advertise our event in local businesses.  After the writing was printed, each student added his or her own designs and colors to the posters and invitations we sent out.  All of our invitations have been sent and students are working on putting posters up this week.

Here's the poster we wrote:

This shared writing activity allowed me to work with students to develop writing for a real-world audience.  (I love it when writing becomes SO important because it is leaving our classroom and being seen by many people!)  We worked together to "stretch out" words and used some of the blends we are learning (like "er" and "ay") to help us spell words.  It was also a good opportunity to practice the lowercase letters we are learning in our printing lessons.  Everyone contributed to our writing and we are really proud of the end product!