About 2 months ago, with the support of Regina Lowe, I devised a digital multimedia project for her Kindergarten class - creating a field guide of common Ohio animals and their adaptations. We began the project by showing the students all types of field guides and had a class discussion about what the books are used for and the information they provide. Then we asked the students if they wanted to create their very own field guide and the answer was a resounding "Yes"! (I love the enthusiasm of a kindergartner). We then used maps, first finding Earth, the continents, North America, the United States, Ohio, and then finally Vermilion. The students all had identified Ohio and had a dot on their maps in their research journals indicating the approximate (and I do stress approximate) location of our city.
(Link to the Field Guide Project Plan - complete with standards!)
(Link to the Research Journal here)
As a class, we came up with a list of animals that live in Ohio. Most of the animals students listed were mammals, so I thought I would incorporate a bit of classification into the project by showing them some common birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, and other mammals. Each group created a poster of an animal group identifying some of the major distinguishing features of that group. For example, the group having mammals drew lots of hair on their illustrations. Once the posters were created, we played a game, where we randomly choose an Ohio animal and then every student stood by the poster in the room showing the group that animal belonged. (We are still working on reptiles versus amphibians.)
After the students were acquainted with a variety of Ohio animals, it was time to select everyone's own animal to research. Students were chosen by random to select their animal, which they then illustrated on the first page of their research notebooks. Next, I conferenced with each student about the questions they had about their animal. We received questions like "How do turkeys make a gobbling sound?", "How does a largemouth bass live in the winter?" and "How far can a bullfrog jump?".
Now, the hard part. How was I going to research with each student to find the answers to their questions about their animal with only a few short weeks to finish the field guide? (I had given myself an April 21st deadline since we arranged the Erie Metroparks to give all the Kindergarten classes a live animal demonstration that day.) I considered using a safe search engine such as KidzSearch or Safe Search For Kids with a text-to-speech tool, but was concerned about the quality of information each student would be able to comprehend. In the end, we were fortunate to have 3 teachers (thank you Mr. Kacur and Mrs. Lowe) and 2 high school students (so very grateful to Jocelyn and Haylie) researching one-on-one with each student. Every student was able to have individual time discussing the information we were discovering about their animal, which ended up being the ideal situation. This drives home the need for strong collaboration between our teachers both within and between buildings to provide that support needed to take on these more daunting student projects.
To construct the actual book, we are considering using Google Docs or Slides, downloading the product as a PDF and then uploading to FlipSnack. Or, we could use iBooks Author and publish to iTunes U or the iBooks Store. Perhaps we will use both to discover pros and cons and blog about those in an upcoming post. In the meantime, be on the look out for our published field guide coming soon!
No comments:
Post a Comment