I met with our school Reading Clinician today! It was an exciting meeting as we met to discuss our Mentor Text Writing Project that we will be collaborating on in early May. We plan to LIVE TWEET!! Live tweet from Room 122! We will be tweeting out tweets, students will be tweeting and learning how to reflect in 140 characters or less! This is going to be awesome!
Backstory:
I recently joined twitter (laura_thomas_99 ~ follow me!) and I am just becoming comfortable with this form of social media and connecting with the World. I am no social media guru; but I do have a private instagram account, facebook account and I do snapchat. I love social media for the instant connection you can make with friends and family. As a parent myself, I love how easy it is to post daily tidbits, interesting, funny things that happen and it is really like an online, digital memory box of my life.
For the past few months I have been trying to think of ways to really open up the lines of communication to the parents and relatives of the students in Room 122. There is so much learning that is happening each and every day and it is at times difficult for these grade 1’s and 2’s to share by the time they get home. For the past 10 years I have done a weekly TWAS (This Week At School) with some success. Students write about fun things that happened, things they learned over the course of the week. I say some success, because very few students actually enjoyed writing TWAS and it was not an accurate representation of their week or their writing ability. So over the past year or so I have been doing a lot of reflecting with students, with parents and with myself. How can I show student learning? How can students show and share their learning?
When I ask students this they said: “facebook, a backpack with interesting facts inside, write facts in a bottle and send it in the River, write a book, do a presentation, youTube video, Poster, Bulletin Board, e-mail, video to share with parents, post online!” . As you can see, online technology came up quite a bit. These children have never known a life without technology. They learn it faster than we ever will, it is intuitive to them.
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So back to a meeting of minds! Monique and I met in early February to discuss working together on a writing project. At some point in the meeting, I thought; How cool would it be to LIVE TWEET this out to parents! Monique was encouraging and thought this was fantastic! So we started planning our project and planning how we would use twitter to communicate with parents. We set up twitter accounts and we started our explorations with twitter, so we would know how to tweet, re tweet and respond to comments.
We choose our Mentor text book – An Okoboji Day. This is a book from my personal collection, I bought it for my kids last summer. Okoboji is a place close to our hearts, it is where my brother and sister-in-law have a beautiful cabin on the water and we get to visit over the summer! The book has many literary components that we will be focusing on. And we plan to use it to model our way through students writing A Winnipeg Day.
Pre-teaching is happening right now! Students have brought in a place close to their hearts in Winnipeg. They have presented about their place. We mapped it on a map of Winnipeg. It is unbelievable to see all the cool places the students love! They love looking at that map, finding their houses and other places too. Next we are going to tally how many students have been to those places. What are Room 122’s favourite places?
Students will then take this information and begin to plan out places that they would visit in A Winnipeg day.
A Winnipeg Day.
Coming Soon…..
