This week in Grade Two…..
It was busy week in Grade Two as we tried to finish up a few
tasks and prepare for open house. Not
everything went as smoothly as planned though.
As we are coming to the end of our Fairy Tale unit, students
were typing up their good copies of their twisted version of The Three Little
Pigs and completing the finishing touches on their Storybird picture
books. So guess what happened? Board-wide internet issues on the day we had
time in the computer lab!
The next day the lab was booked all day so we borrowed
netbooks from where-ever possible and snuck students into the lab whenever
there was an empty seat. Although not everyone had both stories finished, each
student had at least one completed to put on display for open house.
The internet issues concerned me for another reason, as I
had registered the class for the Peter Reynolds webcast (Teacher Appreciation
Week Celebrations through Discovery Education).
I was already nervous about the endeavour as it was my first attempt at using
a live broadcast with the kids.
Everything ran smoothly in the set up for the event, but there were some
glitches in the actual experience.
First of all, I didn’t prepare the students well enough for
what we were about to watch. I think I
was hesitant to talk too much about it beforehand in case it didn’t work
out. Even though we did discuss what a
webcast is and what we would be watching, I’m not sure that all of the students
understood that it was a live broadcast rather than a video.
The second problem was in the set up. The sound quality was a bit off and at times
it was difficult to understand what the author was saying. I found a time lag that caused the audio and
the visual to be out of sync compounded this problem. Most of the time the action took place in a
small percentage of the screen space, and although I tried to adjust this I
could not find a way to do so. The full
screen was used for a demonstration of Animation-ish and during a story reading
and that was much more engaging for students.
Overall, I would give the experience a 4 out of 10. Using videos has an advantage over live
broadcasts as you know what you will be seeing ahead of time, but I am willing
to try live streaming again.
Our Open House exhibit, by comparison, was very low tech but
filled with inquiry learning, experimentation and a whole lot of fun. The students have been studying
three-dimensional figure in mathematics. They were given a variety of figures, excluding rectangular prisms, and
were faced with the task of describing the figures using mathematical language
and then investigating whether or not they would work to build a domino
run. They were required to explain their
thinking using picture and words. Next they
were given the rectangular prisms and given the same task. This was followed up with inquiries
concerning the size of the prisms and the distance between prisms necessary to create a successful domino run. Students
discovered that if you hit the dominos too low they could fall in the wrong
direction. They also used the
information they gathered to attempt setting dominos going up and down
inclines. All of their data was put on
display for Open House…..but that wasn’t the fun part.
The class had asked the entire school to contribute boxes of
Kraft Dinner for their exhibit, stipulating that the macaroni and cheese would
be donated to the local food bank after Open House. Ninety-six boxes were collected. That night we pushed all of the desks to the
perimeter of the room to create a large open floor space and the fun began. Those KD boxes were made into some awesome domino
runs!
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