Submitted by: Roxanne Buff, Jennifer Cable, Kathleen Cummings, Carolyn Lang, Eileen Maier, & Nikki Scott
Collaborators: Michelle Grubbs, Karen Hues, Elizabeth Gleason, Ashley Cogbill, Lori Marks, Laurel Heath
School: Springfield Park Elementary
Summary
The students will listen to a variety of non-fiction literature about life in the past. They will also watch the video clip from Scholastic (“A Voyage From The Pilgrims”). Students will work cooperatively in pairs to reproduce individual trunks using a given set of materials. The culminating activity will be for students to design and create a trunk. They will pack researched items to bring on their trip. They will be assembling and synthesizing information to complete their trunk-building tasks. The teachers will also use the video camera on the iPads to record the students explaining the mechanics of their trunks, as well as sharing what they packed and why they chose certain items to go in their trunk. The students had to decipher between needs and wants to determine what to pack. Our students’ recordings were shared on our school’s blog.
TIPC Ratings
This lesson is Developing in Research & Information Fluency
The teachers led a discussion around a KWL chart which allowed the students to collectively generate questions for research. The teachers directed the use of pre-determined information resources by reading books aloud to the students and showing a video and website. Students also participated in hands on activities, such as making candles and dying cloth with berries, to understand what life was like long ago.
This lesson is Developing for Communication & Collaboration. The students worked on individual trunks, but communicate with their peers throughout the project. The students were recorded individually explaining how they created their trunk and which items they would take on their voyage using the video camera on the iPad. The videos were sent to the teacher using DropBox. Some of these videos were combined into an iMovie and posted on the school blog. Students also had conversations around each others trunks when they took a tour of the trunks.
Throughout the trunk building process the students generated and responded to purposeful questions. During the video reflection on the building and packing process, the students justified their decision making and problem solving practices. Students reflected on the process as a class when they revisited their KWL chart to fill in what they had learned.
The students analyzed trends and made predictions that helped them to determine how to design and build their trunks and what to pack inside of their trunks. The students created meaningful, original work. The students then reflected on the creative process during the video interviews.
