GRA Week 5: The OK Book

This week during the Global Read Aloud Project, we collaborated with a Grade 1/2 class nearby in Kanata. We were finally successful at connecting over Google Hangout to chat with another class. The students did such a great job at being patient and at chatting with the class over Hangout for the first time. We chatted about all of the books that we've read by Amy Krouse Rosenthal over the past few weeks during the Global Project. It was great to see the students ask so many detailed questions. They also had great answers to the questions that Mrs. Mason's class asked us. A Hangout provides students with many different opportunities to collaborate, to share, to inquire and to discover new ideas. We are opening our classroom doors on a global scale when we invite another classroom into ours via a Hangout. The students were excited about meeting Mrs. Mason's grade 1/2 class and hope that they could do it again soon. After our Hangout, her class sent us many Tweets to share more things they loved about the Global Project we are both working on. Students are beginning to use Twitter to answer questions sent to us from classes we learn with. We experimented with it at our Writing Center today.

All week we talked about what the word OK means. We experimented with Google Slides to create our own version of Amy Krouse Rosenthal's OK book. Students were challenged to use Slides and Google Draw to create their own OK images and learned how to Google and insert their own images onto their Book page. It was great to see the students experiment with a tool that they hadn't used before. They quickly became experts and were excited to help their friends learn some of tricks to using the tools. We will definitely be using Google Slides again for shared learning opportunities. Creating our own class book inspired some students to create their own books at our Writing Center. We are just in the early stages of adding ideas to our writing center but so far we have many eager authors in our room. Below is our completed OK Book. We hope you enjoy reading about our OK adventures!

GRA Week 3: Making Ishful Connections!

This week during the Global Read Aloud Week 3, students had the opportunity to read the great story...ISH! This story by Peter H. Reynolds allowed us to show our creative sides...AGAIN! We explored how to make ishful drawings and we also chatted about Ish connections. 

What does ISH mean? We didn't really know at first. After reading the story, students came up with many different ways to say ISH. Have a look! 

When reading the story, students made text-to-self connections. They noticed that Ramon was not showing grit at the beginning of the story.  He gave up when his brother made fun of his work. Students have been learning how to show grit even when they want to give up, or when a task seems too hard. Here is a link to our GRIT brainstorm from a few days ago. Students are demonstrating that they know how to show GRIT in all parts of their school day. Way to go friends! 

At the end of the story, Ramon demonstrated grit after his sister inspired him to be creative and keep drawing ishful things! Students made their own personal connections and wrote about when they showed grit. We will continue to focus on this important skill as time goes on. Students are working to demonstrate grit in all parts of their day (during a math lesson, when playing a game on the yard, when reading a story, etc).We also had the opportunity to chat with another class on Google Hangout today. We chatted about our connections to the story Ish. Many students got to share their ish drawings and their ish connections that we wrote about. Special thank you to the grade three students in Mrs. Caluori's class. We enjoyed meeting you and can't wait to chat online again. 

Below are some of our Twitter thinking and ishful exchanges after our Hangout today!

Wn an bt says: today we google chat with another gade 3 class!😄
— Mrs. Ciampa (@MrsCiampaClass) October 24, 2014

jp says: ish menes 5050. #GRA14
— Mrs. Ciampa (@MrsCiampaClass) October 24, 2014

NN and AB says:Today on google hangout we talked about grit and our connections on our papers and we explained what grit means.
— Mrs. Ciampa (@MrsCiampaClass) October 24, 2014

HH:Today we ate pizza and it was yummy and we talked with the grade 3 class we talked about ish .
— Mrs. Ciampa (@MrsCiampaClass) October 24, 2014

@MrsCiampaClass GC says, "Thank you students for being so nice and polite when we met today."
— Mrs. DelahuntCaluori (@lcaluori) October 24, 2014

@MrsCiampaClass IL says, "It was fun talking "ish" with you." #GRA14
— Mrs. DelahuntCaluori (@lcaluori) October 24, 2014

@MrsCiampaClass AL says"We had a fun time meeting you. We hope you had a fun time meeting us."
— Mrs. DelahuntCaluori (@lcaluori) October 24, 2014

GRA Week 2: I'm Here

Our class participated in Week 2 of the Global Read Aloud project. We continue to focus on the author study project featuring books written by Peter H. Reynolds. 

This week's story is called I'm Here. The story is about a little boy who is lonely, playing on the school yard all by himself. We learn how he feels and what he does to keep busy while all other friends are playing. We learn how his imagination helps him to reach out to a friend!

To share and connect using the story this week, we organized a Google Hangout with another Grade 3 class in our city. Mrs. King's Class is a grade 3 class not too far from us. We introduced ourselves and talked about our schools. Some students in our classroom were experiencing a Google Hangout for the first time. We even learned about their school like what a portable is and what kind of earrings their principal wore today!

During our chat, one student in our class recalled how the story reminded her of a previous short video we watched in Religion a few weeks ago. The students made the connection between the friendship video we watched to the book I'm Here. Little did we know...the story I'm Here was the SAME story as the video about friendship we watched! 

As our chat went on, students began to make many connections between Peter Reynolds's books The North Star and I'm Here. We noticed that some of his illustrations were similar. We also noticed that he included a picture of the north star in I'm Here! We thought that was pretty neat. We also shared with Mrs. King's class the Twitter secret we received. Our classes compared North Star Part 2 story ideas. We hope that Peter Reynolds will use some of our cool ideas for the real part 2 that he is writing. Students did an amazing job of listening, sitting quietly and waiting their turn during the video chat. We were happy to meet Mrs. King's class and hope to visit or meet her students one day!

After the chat, we talked about what making connections mean. Students recalled the 3 types of connections we can make to stories (Text-to-Text, Text-to-Self and Text-to-World). We even wrote our own definitions. Some students had the opportunity to build an 'I'm Here' Connection poster. We wrote about our connections to the story I'm Here. Some drew pictures and demonstrated what I'm Here reminded them of. The Grade 3's have wonderful connections to the story. 

ASK YOUR CHILD WHAT KIND OF CONNECTION THEY CAN MAKE TO PETER REYNOLD'S STORY: I'M HERE! Below is a link to the video that we previously watched in Religion. We watched it again to see more connections we could make. 

We are having a wonderful experience with the Global Read Aloud Project so far. Students are getting many opportunities to connect and share their learning. I hope that the next story in the project continues to inspire the students just like the first 2 already have!

Shared-Learning Video Chat!

We enjoyed a fun treat today. A grade 2 class in our city chatted with us on Twitter! They are also using pumpkins to count and describe. They asked us to guess how many seeds we thought were inside of their class pumpkin. Have a read at some of the tweet guesses we sent Mr. Robinson's class!

Mr. Robinson's class called us over Google Hangout. Google Hangout is a video chat that we used to do a shared read aloud. They started to read us the story...How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin? It was so great to hear their grade 2 class read this story to us. Our class was really excited. They had many connections to the story today and we got to share one of them. We told their class how we cleaned our pumpkin yesterday. We had to separate the goop and the seeds!  We ran out of time and they will call us again tomorrow to finish the story! Ask your child about this neat opportunity!