Last year I learned about the Global Read Aloud from a Twitter friend of mine named Tam Scharf who lives in Australia.  She is a great collaborator and friend to me, despite the fact that we have never really met, have only spoken in person once (well really it was over Skype), and don’t even live on the same continent or teach the same grade (anymore at least–we both taught 5th grade we first “met” in 2011).  I love that that story actually describes many teachers who are important parts of my professional learning network.

But anyway….the Global Read Aloud 2016 started this week and we are off to a running start already!  We began with a short introduction to what it is,

who we would be studying and what they could look forward to doing over the next 6 weeks. We watched a video and checked out the website of Lauren Castillo, the author and illustrator we’d be studying.  Very shortly they were hooked and SUPER excited to join the almost 900,000 kids who would be studying the same books!

This week’s book (as you can see in the video) is Nana in the City, and is all about bravery.  After we read and discussed the story, we got busy answering this question:

We got busy thinking and drawing and I was really impressed (and a little surprised) with what they came up with.  Check out our work!

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We are excited to read more and write more and share our thinking!  There are some other friends in our school who are also participating and we’re hoping to share our thinking with them, as well.  Tomorrow we plan on joining a Twitter chat about Lauren Castillo’s books, too, so we can talk about what we like, what we think and who we are.  We may also build cityscapes to teach others about where we live.  The opportunities are endless!  I’m excited to share more and we go along!! 🙂