The Many Phases of Research - Part 2!

Four very proud illustrators!

Back in December I wrote about a moon research project that my first graders were working on.  (You can click here to see that post!)  Well, we took a hiatus from that project while my student teacher, Miss Anderson, planned her own activities to share with the students during her time at Ashaway.  Miss Anderson has now moved on to an exciting new adventure, but before she left we put together the students' work into a PowerPoint presentation I could share with them this week!

A hard copy of their presentations will be bound into a book to be enjoyed in the library, but during class the students were able to see their illustrations projected onto the SmartBoard. 

Click here to view the presentation made by Mrs. Breault's class!

Click here to view the presentation made by Miss Mooney's class!

Communities Project

My third grade students have been working on a special project to learn about the four different types of communities: cities, suburbs, towns and farming towns.  All of them were assigned to one of these four groups.  To begin, we watched a video about communities and discussed the attributes of each one.  As part of this exploration I created a SmartBoard sorting activity.


To help the students visualize how the locations of each type of community are related to each other, I had four students stand various distances apart.  "Suburb" was right next to "city", "town" was next to "suburb" but farther away from "city", and "rural" was sent to the the far side of the room!  :)

The students explored what made their group's community the same or different from the other kinds.  After many meetings taking notes, each student wrote about one characteristic of their group's community and found a picture online that helped to illustrate this information.  Finally, we imported their pictures into a PhotoStory and the students recorded their voices to narrate the pictures.

The students enjoyed recording their voices into the computer with the special headphone microphone!

Miss Anderson did an enormous amount of work on this project while she was here!

The whole third grade came down to the library this morning to enjoy watching the four different PhotoStory presentations.  I'm happy to report that their teachers were impressed!  :)