This is an education-related blog written by Mrs. Leah Obach @LeahO77. Leah is currently working as the Literacy with ICT Teacher Leader for Park West School Division, working with K-12 students and teachers to help them use technology for teaching and learning. She has taught at the early years, middle years and high school levels. Student work, teacher reflection, resources and samples from classrooms around PWSD are included in this blog.
Showing posts with label Olympics learning projects. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Olympics learning projects. Show all posts
Monday, February 10, 2014
Olympics Math
We've added a new element to our Olympics project. One of the advantages of project based learning is the way it brings together different subject areas. We've been doing lots of reading and writing related to the Olympics, so I was excited to introduce some Olympics math today! Thanks to my teacher friend, Mrs. Thom, we have a beautiful graph to track the medals won by our Canadian Olympic team. We also added a page to summarize the information and add together the medals for a grand total. We also had fun with our Olympics word problem today.
Thursday, February 6, 2014
Showing Support for our Olympic Athletes!
We were all very excited when the postcards we designed arrived from the printer this week! Students were eager to start drafting postcard messages, so we reviewed the message criteria we set with the Kindergartens and students started working on their writing. Once students had a draft, they met with me to review, revise and edit their writing to ensure it met the criteria. Then students wrote their final message on our beautiful postcards! We've had a difficult time finding an address to send postcards directly to athletes, so we decided we'd use our Twitter connections to share the postcards. We photographed each message and sent them to athletes on Twitter before mailing the actual postcard. This way, we hope athletes will read them now even if they don't get the actual postcard until a later date.
Two postcards from our class were chosen by Olympic Lens to be featured on their Olympics website of photos! It was so exciting to see my students' work shared with an even wider audience since they worked so hard on the postcard design, message writing and athlete research!
Two postcards from our class were chosen by Olympic Lens to be featured on their Olympics website of photos! It was so exciting to see my students' work shared with an even wider audience since they worked so hard on the postcard design, message writing and athlete research!
Postcards featured on Olympic Lens can be viewed here:
I'll keep adding more postcard photos here as well:
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Olympics Project: Modeling Internet Research & Encouraging Digital Citizenship
My hardworking and curious group of Grade 1s has jumped on board for our Olympics learning project. After our Skype call launch with the OLCS Kindergartens on Tuesday, our class did some research together to answer two of their inquiry questions. This allowed me to model some basic research. Students suggested we use the internet to find information, so I modeled a web search and read aloud information from a relevant website. After listening, some rereading and discussion, students were ready to answer the two questions.
We wrote our answers together; students explained their understandings and I typed for them. Next, we discussed the importance of verifying information to ensure that it is correct. Students identified that "not everything on the internet is true" (I thought it was great that they knew this!), so we checked our information by using another website. Then, we also discussed the importance of sourcing since we'd used other people's ideas and information to help us learn. We included the websites we'd used in our post to show that we had learned from those sites.
It was one short activity, but deliberate teaching allowed me to address a number of important topics and skills:
We wrote our answers together; students explained their understandings and I typed for them. Next, we discussed the importance of verifying information to ensure that it is correct. Students identified that "not everything on the internet is true" (I thought it was great that they knew this!), so we checked our information by using another website. Then, we also discussed the importance of sourcing since we'd used other people's ideas and information to help us learn. We included the websites we'd used in our post to show that we had learned from those sites.
It was one short activity, but deliberate teaching allowed me to address a number of important topics and skills:
- digital citizenship: giving credit to our sources when we learn from others
- Olympics inquiry: we answered questions that they students had generated for this project
- shared writing: working together, we wrote sentences that clearly communicated our answers
- research skills: verifying information, searching online, using visual and text information
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Olympics Inquiry
We are working with our friends in OLCS Kindergarten to learn about the Olympics. This morning, we had a Skype call with Mrs. Caldwell and her class. I explained to the boys and girls that a big event is happening in the world this winter, but did not tell them what special event I was talking about. Before watching this video, Mrs.Caldwell and I asked our students to be detectives and look for clues in the video about what the big event might be. After watching the video, a student correctly guessed that the big event is the Olympics.
Many of us did not know very much about the Olympics, so we shared our ideas and then students came up with some inquiry questions. We made an agreement to share responsibility for finding answers to our questions. Each class chose questions to focus on. It will be our job to find answers to some of our initial questions and post them to our blog so the Kindergartens and other classes can also learn what we found out. The Kindergartens will also find answers to some of the questions and, in turn, post their learning for us to see. Students also requested that we share our learning on Twitter, but, since Tweets have to be very short, students decided that we would write our answers on the blog and share the blog posts via Twitter.
We discussed some possible sources for information and students came up with the ideas of using books, internet and people to help them learn about the Olympics. We are excited to get started!
Watch for more posts once the Grade 1s start sharing their learning! Classrooms, teachers, parents and community members - please feel free to join us in learning about the Olympics and share what you know, sources of information or your own learning.
Many of us did not know very much about the Olympics, so we shared our ideas and then students came up with some inquiry questions. We made an agreement to share responsibility for finding answers to our questions. Each class chose questions to focus on. It will be our job to find answers to some of our initial questions and post them to our blog so the Kindergartens and other classes can also learn what we found out. The Kindergartens will also find answers to some of the questions and, in turn, post their learning for us to see. Students also requested that we share our learning on Twitter, but, since Tweets have to be very short, students decided that we would write our answers on the blog and share the blog posts via Twitter.
We discussed some possible sources for information and students came up with the ideas of using books, internet and people to help them learn about the Olympics. We are excited to get started!
Watch for more posts once the Grade 1s start sharing their learning! Classrooms, teachers, parents and community members - please feel free to join us in learning about the Olympics and share what you know, sources of information or your own learning.
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