I think it was two years ago when I first officially joined the Global Read Aloud. We were reading The Year of Billy Miller that year and I was teaching 2nd grade. I was invited by my Tweep Tam in Australia and was excited to collaborate worldwide with other kids and teachers reading the same text. Then last year, as I returned to 1st grade, I brought Ms. Turken along for the ride and had an even more amazing journey exploring and responding to Lauren Castillo books!
As we moved into this fall, excitement was high to join this project again, and THE DAY IS FINALLY HERE! We are so jazzed to be studying Mem Fox (and old, familiar favorite author!) and sharing our learning along the way. We will for sure use Seesaw to show our friends and family our thinking, but also hope to collaborate with other kids via Skype, too.
We started with a short video about Mem Fox, and some wondering about both her life and Australia, where she lives. Then, I shared a book I had written when I was teaching 2nd grade (as a mentor text during a culture study we were doing in Social Studies). It was a little indulgent–I got to have a Peter Reynolds moment and say “Australian Culture, by ME!”–but also helped give kids some background on Australia before we read.
Australian Culture BookKiddos wrote and drew about what they learned and uploaded their thinking to their Seesaw journals.
Today we came back, ready to hear Koala Lou (the first week’s book), but instead we first teased kiddos with a habit that we’ve learned that good readers do–take a sneak peek. We studied the front and back covers and kiddos made predictions about what they thought the story might be about. They did a pretty good job of guessing some things that actually happened in the story. Again, these were uploaded into Seesaw so we could share our learning. 🙂
Then…finally, last thing today, IT WAS TIME to finally hear the story! We gathered in Rm. 112 and it sounded something like this:
We are SO EXCITED to see what comes next! Art maybe? Have any suggestions for us? 🙂
Have you seen the SUPER AWESOME patio we have on the back of Rms. 111 and 112? Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. We have plans for how we can use this place for whole group situations (anyone wanna buy us an outdoor rug?), or maybe adding some different seating so kids or groups could work out there on nice days. On this day, it was perfect for a picnic lunch with our first grade friends. I think it’s funny how few students that looks like, but trust me, there are 40 kiddos and 3 adults out there in that space together. 🙂
20somethingkids and 1kookyteacher 