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!

Postcards featured on Olympic Lens can be viewed here:

bit.ly/LTT2tQ  

http://bit.ly/1c8rnLY 

I'll keep adding more postcard photos here as well:

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Olympics Postcard Designs

We have continued to work with our friends in Oak Lake Kindergarten and our families at home to learn about the Olympics.  Many students have made guest blog posts sharing their home research and we have also done some posts together as a class.  Students worked in small groups to build knowledge of the Olympic sports and recorded their new understandings using research organizers. 

While we were on a Skype call discussing our project with the Kindergartens, students had the neat idea to send something to Olympic athletes.  They suggested the ideas of sending pictures and messages, so we decided to make postcards with pictures on the front and messages on the back.  We set criteria for our work so that we'd know what our goals were, then we got to work designing our postcards.   The Kindergartens had used Autocollage before, so they thought it would work well for designing the front of our postcards.   We used our art work photos to make cool collages.  Then we had to design the back of our postcards to meet our criteria.  We wanted :room to write, a spot for a stamp, space for an address and a QR code linked to the Little Hands Extended blog so people could find out more about our project!

Watching our collages come together in Autocollage was a lot of fun!  Making room for everything on the back of our postcards was tricky, but we managed to make it work.  We even had to do some problem solving and re-designing when Mrs. Caldwell pointed out that our original design had the QR code in the spot that the post office would use.  We made changes and our final product looks great, we can't wait for the printed postcards to arrive!