PhotoStory in Year 2

In my first year I didn't teach kids PhotoStory. I was trying to keep my head above water, and opted for other methods that students could present their work. In year two, particularly once we went 3 to 1 with netbooks, I broke out PhotoStory with the kids. It was mildly successful, although there were some things I needed to do differently. This year I have busted out PhotoStory fairly early on with big dreams of righting some of my previous mistakes.

The Set-Up
We have been reading about a myriad of American Indian Cultural Regions. To me, this presented an opportunity for us to do the following:
1. categorize information (Geography, Natural Resources, Culture, etc)
2. analyze the information for strengths and weaknesses
3. compare and contrast information from different regions

The big question one always have with this sort of thing is: Now what?! I opted to have kids create a PhotoStory persuading others to settle in that region. In doing that, they would need to synthesize all of that information into a persuasive piece.

Differences in Year Two
One of the things I have done differently is providing enough scaffolding leading up to the PhotoStory. Kids need to practice analyzing information in different ways. They need to look for strengths and explain why they are strengths. These can then be used in their PhotoStory. Another change was printing out the storyboard they used. Instead of having kids type into a form I created, I wanted them to be computer-free. This would keep the focus on the narration and content.

The result has been dramatically different (I think...). We aren't finished, but kids are making great strides. They are writing really persuasive pieces that use specific details to describe their assigned region. They are making comparisons that accurately reflect why their region would be more desireable ("Come to the Southwest region where the climate is always warm and dry unlike the Northwest where it rains all the time."). While it is a different cohort, and we aren't done, I'd like to think the scaffolding has helped them be far more successful.

Fiction. Finally!

I've been itching to get rolling with fiction this year. Looking back to last year, it was about October that I pulled out our reading textbook to use. I used it in conjunction with our social studies text, but never really carved out a niche for either. The result was a bit muddled, and felt disjointed. I'm sure it wasn't as effective as I'd hoped.

This year I decided to stay with the social studies text a little longer. We rolled from a geography primer into a Native American primer (environments, migration, and cultural regions). We'll wrap that up tomorrow with an assessment, moving us onward to fiction. For me, that is a fantastic development.

Our reading block should be fun. We'll read a snippet (15-20 pages) from Earthquake Terror by Peg Kehret. We'll work on making predictions, as well as inferences (since they are so similar). We'll also work on structures of writing, as some are sequential while others are by main idea. We'll also get a chance to start using our FQR sheets to record important events, saving some work for when our novel study begins. Therein is the real rub. All of this starts to point to our novel study units to come, which the kids really enjoyed last year. We were able to analyze characters and have discussions about literature. To me, that is an exciting development.

Hooray for tomorrow!

Scavenger Hunt- American Indian Edition

This week we are wrapping up our study of American Indians. Our study has been far more general than specific, fitting with the state EALR/GLE (4.1.2 History). The specific name is: Understanding development of Indigenous Societies in North America. The reason for the lack of depth is twofold: 1) Native Americans are covered in greater depth in Grade 4, and 2) this sets the scene for the encounter part of this GLE where Europeans "manifest destiny" by driving them off the land. Without any prior knowledge of these people, and their ability to adapt, then you miss how devastating this encounter was.

Tomorrow we'll be doing a scavenger hunt. A treasure hunt if you will, where the treasure happens to be important pieces of information. Embedded in this treasure hunt is the skill of deconstructing questions to determine importance (i.e. what information is most important in this question). If you can't determine what information is important, you're left with a big pile of information that you really can't sift through. Beyond that they'll continue to practice comparing and contrasting. They'll do this 2-3 times on this hunt. Finally, they'll be asked two higher order questions. First they'll need to name one reading/writing skill we worked on that everyone should know... and create a question where you would use that skill. Since this has been a big target for us, I am not imagining a huge issue with this. Then they'll need to name 3 big ideas or key pieces of information they think all of their peers should need to know.

This will give us some good fuel for Tuesday's round of Jeopardy, and our Wednesday assessment. Since I am most concerned about reading/writing skills, we'll have this as an open book assessment. Am I more concerned with their being able to tell me the climate in the Great Plains, or whether they can locate the appropriate information in the text? The latter is a more useful skill in my eyes.