Earlier this year the class completed a Social Studies unit about Kindness and at the end of the unit, the entire class entered the Be Kind People Project Creative Expression Contest to demonstrate what he or she had learned. I am thrilled and honored to announce we had a first place winner in the technology category!
Part of Liam's prize included a Skype for the whole class with Akellz from the Be Kind Crew.
Akellz was a ton of fun and lead the class through the Be Kind Pledge. He discussed every word in the pledge, what it meant and why it was important. Then he had the kids partner up and create a kindness handshake.
The kids loved being out of their seats singing, dancing, cheering and clapping! Below is a little snippet from our Skype.
We have participated in quite a few Mystery Skypes this year and my class loves them! Almost all of our Mystery Skypes have been geography based, guessing the location of the other class by asking them yes or no questions. However, last week we branched out and did a Mystery Book Club via Skype.
It was very challenging! While there are only 50 possible states to choose from, there are literally millions of books! Although my class consists of voracious readers, we have not read every single book ever published, so we had to use our research, problem solving and deductive reasoning skills to solve the mystery.
Clues that helped us guess the books the other class presented us included author information, award information, publication date and genre. When students realized they were not going to be able to effortlessly figure out the book title, they quickly took to the Internet and started researching. Students also formed great follow up questions to help them figure out the book title.
My students really enjoyed this new challenge and I was impressed by their research and presentation skills.
This week my class participated in our first Mystery Skype of the year!
Their Cowboy Hats Threw Us A Bit! Turns Out It Was A Spirit Day
Students were assigned roles: greeter, questioner, researcher, answerer or closer. We practiced and eagerly waited for our Mystery Class to dial in.
We asked lots of questions and used maps to try to figure out where the other class was. We knew they weren't the largest state, or the smallest state, their state did not begin with a vowel and did not border another country. We were finally ready to guess.... was our Mystery Skype Class in Nebraska?
Back To The (Virtual) Drawing Board
Nope! We continued asking questions and doing research based on the answers and eventually guessed again.
Hooray! We Got It!
Our Mystery Skype Class was in Pennsylvania and the Skype was facilitated by Mr. Soskil, an educator I met through Twitter. Mr. Soskil blogged about this activity from his perspective too. My class had a wonderful time with this Inquiry Based lesson and we can't wait to do another one! If you are interested in doing a Mystery Skype with us please contact me! Leave a comment on this post or tweet me @MsMensing.
Today we participated in our very first Skype of the year, with the one and only Mrs. P!
She gave us some wonderful tips on how to be a writer. My favorite quote was, "If you can tell a story, you can write a story!" She also talked a lot about the importance of reading and reminded us that, "reading is cool and so are you!"
During our discussion she told us some silly stories and took lots of questions from the class. At the very end she told us about her "Be A Famous Writer" contest. The topic this year is time travel, which just so happens to tie in with our spelling lists from last week.
We didn't want to say goodbye because we were having such a great time with Mrs. P, but eventually we had to. Once we finally did, we got out our Chromebooks and got to work writing time travel stories using Google docs!
This writing project is something we will continue to work on in class and students are welcome to work on it at home if they choose, too. All the details of the writing contest can be found in the flyer below!
A couple weeks ago we participated in our first Mystery Skype and the students LOVED IT!
It was such a fabulous learning opportunity, I was eager to get involved in another one as soon as possible!
We set up some guidelines for our Mystery Skypes and students were assigned roles. We had greeters, questioners, answerers and closers and every student was a researcher. To begin the activity, our assigned greeters said hello and welcomed the other Mystery Skype classroom. The purpose of our Mystery Skypes was to figure out what state the other classes were located.
Students took turns asking yes or no questions like, "Does your state border another country? Is your state west of the Mississippi River? Was your state one of the original thirteen colonies?"
Students worked in small groups using portable devices and maps to answer questions about our state and also eliminate the states that based on the clues, couldn't be where our Mystery Skype class was located. As we went along, we got better at answering in complete sentences. "Yes, our state does begin with a vowel. No, our state is not part of New England."
After each class guesses the correct state, the closers take some time and and give the other class some facts about our state, school and class. I couldn't believe the tremendous learning the occurred during each Mystery Skype! Students worked collaboratively, had to communicate effectively, do research, use geography skills, and use deductive reasoning. Throughout both our Mystery Skypes, I saw almost 100% engagement! Watch the video below to see our first Mystery Skype in action!
In honor of "Read Across America" week and Dr. Seuss' birthday, my class read across America, doing a reader's theater with our pen-pal class in Massachusetts. We performed Green Eggs and Ham through a video-conference. My class had the role of "Friend" while our pen-pal class portrayed "Sam-I-Am."
This was a very unique 21st century learning experience and the students enjoyed seeing and chatting with their pen-pals for a few minutes after the reader's theater. A brief clip can be viewed here. We really enjoyed reading across America!
We have been doing some video-conferencing with Jeff Billings, IT Director for Paradise Valley Unified School District. My students always enjoy chatting with Mr. Billings and they learn a lot from him. Along with such a wonderful resource in Mr. Billings, we also feel very lucky to have this amazing Cisco TelePresence unit in the classroom!
The View From The Other Side
We can use this powerful device to teleconference with anyone else who has a Cisco unit and soon, anyone with a computer. A huge piece of 21st century learning is authentic assessment with experts in the field, and the TelePresence unit has the potential to open up the walls of our classroom and bring in experts. If you know anyone with these capabilities, especially at Universities, please let me know! We want a rich, authentic academic environment! The clip below shows you a snippet of one of our conversations with Mr. Billings last week.
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