A Polar Bear Project: Writing about Polar Bears

As part of our polar bear project, our class did a lot of research about polar bears.  Using what they learned, students each wrote a page for a class book about polar bears.  They also narrated their work to create an "audiobook". 

Polar Bear Project: Is this a polar bear?

A massive blizzard hit southwestern Manitoba this week, closing our school for two days and leaving behind massive amounts of snow.  Today our school reopened, but the buses were not running so we had a smaller group of students than usual.  We were working on wrapping up a few jobs from our polar bear project when one student suggested we write a book "Is this a polar bear?" based on a model text Is this a moose? which we had studied earlier in the year.  I was happy to hear that my students wanted to write and were generating ideas for their writing, so we went with this idea as our writing project for today.  Each student chose an animal and selected the image for their page, then wrote their part.  Our final product looks great and the students were excited to do a shared reading of their new book this afternoon! They were eager to share the book online, so I've scanned a copy and made it available online using OneDrive. 

Check out our latest class book, Is This a Polar Bear? with images by pixabay.com  Click on the title page, then scroll to view additional pages. 

A Polar Bear Project: Guest Speakers help us learn

We continue our polar bear project with much enthusiasm!  In addition to building our knowledge of polar bears through research and shared note-taking, we also had the chance to learn from a couple of awesome guest speakers this month!  A guide from the Buffalo Bill Center in Cody, Wyoming took us on a Skype virtual field trip around the center to teach us all about animal adaptations.  A teacher from Winnipeg, Mr. Andy McKiel, also joined us via video call this month to tell us all about his adventures with polar bears when he traveled to Churchill, Manitoba.  We learned a lot from these special guests and we are very grateful that they shared their knowledge with us.  Using video calling in our classroom has allowed us to connect with guest speakers and experts that would not otherwise be available to us.  Check out the Skype in the Classroom page to learn more about how you can use Skype to enhance teaching and learning!

A Polar Bear Project: Collaborative Knowledge Building with OneNote

This month, during a Skype call with Mrs. Caldwell's class, the Oak Lake Kindergartens told us that they were learning about polar bears and planning to participate in the 2017 World Wildlife Fund Polar Bear Walk.   The kindergartens asked our grade 1 class if we would like to collaborate with them for this special project.  The grade 1s were very enthusiastic about the idea, so we agreed to start by doing some research about polar bears.  We decided to use Microsoft OneNote so that we could take notes and collect resources collaboratively.  Mrs. Caldwell set up a shared OneNote file with sections for facts, resources, questions and project planning.  Having a shared file is working very well for this project!

Our class has really enthusiastically started researching polar bears.  We've been doing a lot of reading and writing about polar bears.  Many of our read aloud sessions focus on reading non-fiction texts about polar bears.  As we learn new things about polar bears, we write or type new ideas into the shared OneNote file.  We also read the new ideas that Mrs. Caldwell's class has added from their research.  In addition to our whole-class research and reading, students have also learned new things while listening to reading (recorded books from Epic) and during guided reading lessons.  We have found some interesting educational videos and we like to watch the live polar bear cam from Churchill, MB.  We continue to build our knowledge and share our findings with our partner class.