The Grade 7s worked on a Diseases project in class and presented their individual research as a hand-drawn project. I
thought it would be great for them to take their research and use it to create digital books in Book Creator. The final step would be for them to also narrate
their projects in Book Creator.
I have written a post
about how to use Book Creator in another part of this blog: https://bit.ly/3xx24Vt
.
The Diseases projects
turned out well in Book Creator. You can visit our Grade 7 library
on this link, https://bit.ly/3FY3Fqj and read (and listen to) some of the books.
I am always excited about Dot Day on 15 September. What is Dot Day? It is HUGE around the world! Dot Day was inspired by Peter Reynold's story 'The Dot'. The message is simple but profound: “Start with a dot and see where it will take you,” It is an encouragement to children to find their gift and make their mark in their community. I love this positive approach. Children all over the world love celebrating International Dot Day.
Dot Day in 2019 was especially exciting. My classes were part of a Team blog made up of students from four different continents. (The Team blog can be found at https://dotday.edublogs.org/) We did activities together and the teachers and students loved every minute. I wrote six posts about it on my blog here: https://bit.ly/3EKK0KY
This year My Grade 2s participated in Dot Day. First we read Peter Reynold's famous and lovely story, 'The Dot' online and discussed it. Children love this story. So do I. Here it is below:
Our map story activity
1. After reading and disussing the story, we used our imaginations and wrote about a dot taking us on a trip around the world I gave them maps of the world. You can find the template here: https://bit.ly/3o355dx
2. The class copied and pasted textboxes and arrows at various places on the map, and wrote about their journey around the world.
For this lesson I wanted the Grade Threes to research an endangered animal, and to try and rephrase what they read in their own words. This is a task one needs to start as early as possible at school so that students don't get into the habit of plagiarising by copy and pasting.
How did we go about the lesson?
1. After finding out what the students already knew about endangered animals we watched a video and answered questions about them. The video was the engaging, short video entitled ‘Endangered animals’ by the SciShow Kids: https://bit.ly/3Ed7hUU.
2. The class was then given a selection of animals to choose from - gorilla, leopard, rhino, sea turtle, giant panda, tiger, or blue whale, - and they found out more about the relevant animal using the search engine Kiddle: https://kids.kiddle.co/.
3. After reading about their selected animal using the Kiddle browser, the students opened their template downloaded from Oakdome.com entitled ‘Animal Research Paperless Graphic Organizer’ https://bit.ly/31aajdZ . They then filled in their answers as far as possible in their own words by researching the key words in the template.
4. Finally they turned in their work so that I could take a closer look at it. They did well I thought,
