Wednesday with Mrs Cavanagh and Mrs Booth are great days at Crossmaglen Public School. The children are split into literacy and maths groups for the first two sessions but the last lesson of the day is a whole school digital literacy session with Mrs Booth this term focusing on the #walkmyworld project. Mrs Booth takes the year 4 and 6 students and the morning session for Term 1 concentrates on the digital text Inanimate Alice. The students are loving this and their comprehension skills pushed as they explore the world of Alice, a homeschooled girl, who’s parents live a very nomadic lifestyle travelling from one country to the next. The text is highly interactive and encourages the students to explore and make meaning whilst navigating Alice’s world in a variety of ways. This week Alice was in Russia and she was 13 years old….The episode had an undertone of danger, and the music and visuals were much darker than the previous two which were set in China and Italy. The children gathered information they already knew about Alice and predicted what could happen next. They needed to navigate the gamification element of the story in order to save Alice’s parents. Finally, they needed to re-watch the episode individually on their laptops and PC’s completing a written task that required them to fill in a reading log that contained both factual information from each scene but then required them to interpret these facts. This was a demanding task and we will be concentrating on this activity again next week to consolidate understanding.
Mrs Booth had also started up Google Earth in the morning so the students could travel to each destination where their learning was set. The children enjoy seeing the earth spin as they jump from country to country. This is also a great way for them to gain geographical understanding of Crossmaglens location on Earth and its proximity to other countries.
After lunch everyone came inside and Mrs Booth, Mrs Cavanagh and the children discussed an excerpt of text from the poem Letter to a Poet by Robert Hass
A mockingbird leans
from the walnut, bellies,
riffling white, accomplisheshis perch upon the eaves.
I witnessed this act of grace
in blind California
They looked at an image of a Northern Mockingbird and had a discussion about how it appeared to be a small bird and not very beautiful. Even a little dull. The children noticed that the branches it perched upon were thin. They then explored the meaning behind the line “I witnessed this act of grace in blind California.” After much discussion Lilee and Aimee explained that perhaps this meant that sometimes places and people can be so busy they miss the simple but wondrous moments such as a little dull bird shifting about and settling upon a branch. It was lovely for Mrs Cavanagh and Mrs Booth to hear their ideas as they explored this excerpt and this project and its focus on the poetry of Robert Hass is a perfect way to end the school day. Finally a number of students went outside to take images of trees and shrubs and then they had a big book on birds which they riffled through to select one that would live in their selected tree. These students used an iPad app to draw their chosen bird on the image background. Other students brought in photos from home that linked to last weeks (week 4) poem and were themed around water. They wrote a quick blog post and published it on their individual student blogs. These can be found here by clicking on the hyperlinks.
What a great post with lots of intriguing sharing. I keep thinking I need to get into the Alice Story, but never do. Your post is another reminder to consider the possibilities.
Kevin