Over the last several weeks, the children have been immersed in their studies of the Land Down Under! They've been working on a UBD (also known as an Understanding by Design) project. Their goal was to answer this essential question: "Why would someone want to visit, or live, in this territory of Australia?" Broken into 7 small groups, the students studied a particular region of Australia. They read books, viewed movie clips, and surfed through websites to find all of the pertinent information they could find. They practiced creating an ongoing bibliography by recording each of their sources, and they documented their facts collaboratively as a group. Once the research was complete, the children literally cut apart their notes and separated them into categories. After looking at their information, they decided how the categories should be labeled. (These included landforms, sites to see, jobs, interesting animals, etc.) Finally, using Garage Band, the children verbally recorded their research into podcasts, which we then imported into a Keynote presentation. After adding photos that helped illustrate their research, the wonderful LMC ladies helped us lock these presentations into a movie! The children's projects can be found here!
http://www.sd25.org/~mfijor/Dryden2/Dryden_2.0/2nd_Grade/Pages/Miss_OSullivans_Australia_Projects.html
Special thanks to Mrs. Dufern, Mrs. Powers, Mrs. Kenney, and Mrs. Breaux who helped guide us smoothly through the process, and all of the parent volunteers who helped make this engaging learning experience so successful: Mr. Rolla, Mrs. Santangelo, Mrs. Panarese, and Mrs. Coney! Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Great presentation boys and girls. I learnt a lot about my own country.
ReplyDeleteRob