The Wild Robot: A Tech-Infused Novel Study with Ms. Lussier's Class

Ms. Jlee Lussier’s Grade 4 class at MPS read The Wild Robot by Peter Brown and they’ve done so many exciting learning activities connected to this awesome novel!  This novel study has become an annual tradition for Ms. Lussier’s class and I was excited to be invited to join in on some of the activities again this year.  I had the chance to visit this class for 3 sessions to help them learn about programming and how technology works!

Ms. Lussier challenged her students to create their own robot designs using recycled materials.  In our first session together, the Grade 4s learned to program the micro:bits.  Each student successfully wrote a program to display an image and a string of text on their micro:bit.  For example, students may have programmed a smiley face to appear when button A is pressed and programmed “Hello my name is ______” when button B is pressed.  Students will attach their micro:bits to their robot designs so viewers can interact with the micro:bits when the robots are put on display in the school.  

The micro:bit has 25 programmable LED lights. 

In our second session, students learned to program the Wonder Workshop robots.  Students completed different programming challenges working with a partner or small group.  They learned that the robots measure distance in centimeters and practiced programming lights, sounds and movement.  

The Dash robots from Wonder Workshop are one of my favourite and most-used tools in my tech kit as a K-12 technology coach. 

Students desiged a map to represent the island which the story took place on.  As a class, they chose key locations that were significant to the story and then students worked together to create a large map in 9 sections that was taped together. 

When the map was completed during our third session together, we photographed it and displayed it on the interactive whiteboard.  Students worked together to measure the distance between key locations on the map and we added these measurements to the map, which remained on display for the next part of our activity.  There was lots of great math practice included in this activity!

Students worked with partners to choose locations on the map and planned the steps (on paper) to program the robot to move around the map, including measurements for how far the robot would need to travel between locations.

Finally, using their planning, students wrote a program to move their robot around the map to their planned locations.  Each team tried out their program and then made adjustments if needed.  Students were all able to successfully program the robot to move along their planned path on the map and we celebrated as each team completed this fun challenge!

Thanks to Ms. Lussier and her class for inviting me to join in this amazing learning experience.  I enjoyed watching students engaged in these fun activities, which allowed them to build important skills like communication, collaboration, persistence and problem solving!

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Sketchnoting

I enjoy trying new things in my teaching practice and one of the new things I've been working on recently is using sketchnoting in education.  I've taken a few great workshops about sketchnoting and I finally felt ready to try teaching a sketchnoting workshop for students this fall.  Using what I've learned and some resources from educator Jen Giffen, I offered an Introduction to Sketchnoting workshop for 3 different middle years classes who were taking part in Global Read Aloud.  Sketchnoting offered these students a unique way of capturing their ideas about their Global Read Aloud book.  

Check out some of the sketchnotes students created.  (Students have given permission to share their work.)

Booksnaps by SCS Grade 10

I visited the SCS Grade 10 ELA class last week to introduce them to a different kind of reader response: booksnaps!   The idea of a booksnap (inspired by Tara Martin) is to "snap" a picture of a page in your text which you reacted to and then respond to the text by adding emojis and a short annotation explaining your response.   Booksnaps are a fun way for students to show their thinking about a text.  Students explore their response to the text and demonstrate understanding when choosing symbols and a caption that reflect their ideas about the selected section. 

For this class, students began by reading their choice novels with instructions from their teacher to flag something significant with a sticky note.  The class discussed that a significant passage could be something important to the plot or something that caused a reaction from them.  Once students had some time to read, we introduced the concept of booksnaps by presenting a few samples (student-created and teacher-created examples).  Through examining samples, we set criteria for their work.  Then, it was time to get snapping!

Students returned to the passage they had flagged as significant or read on to find an appropriate section to "snap".  This group of students primarily used SnapChat to create their booksnaps.  (PicCollage, SeeSaw, Google Slides and other tools also work well for creating them.)  Once they had a picture of a page in their book, students added their annotation, emojis and the title and author of the text. When their booksnaps were complete, they downloaded their snaps (rather than sending them to one of their contacts).  Then, students submitted their work to their teacher via Google Classroom.  Their finished products were very well done!

The following are Booksnap examples from this great group of students.

(*shared with permission* thanks for sharing*)