Every year during January we focus on Kansas Symbols and our first graders are responsible for completing a "project." We introduce the symbols, give the students information about them and then they are to create a poster or triarama with 3 facts about one symbol. So there is one adult in the room with 20 students trying to fill out a report page and create their poster/triarama. I'm sure you can guess that this has not gone very well for us. It has always bothered us (my teaching partner and I) that we are just giving the information to the students instead of them finding the information for themselves. Reading levels have always made this a challenge because we have some that can read informational text at a higher level but most of our students would have a very difficult time with this.
Now to this year. Things are different. Because of this masters program and reading blogs from our district technology guy we knew that we needed to make a change. We met with our technology guy and discussed lots of different options of how to go about this project. Some schools send it home for the students to complete at home but we knew that was not an option for our students (for many reasons) nor did we really want to give up on this project. We knew that for our students to research themselves we had to do a lot of the work up front and find information that was at their level or could be read by an adult to them. We also knew that short videos would be a great way for them to get the information they needed along with pictures so they could study the habitat and what the symbol looked like. Now that we had all this we needed a simple way for the students to get to the information. We decided to use QR codes. We put a lot of work into this on our collab day but the exciting part is now we have this for years to come. It's also something we can send home and students can access the information at home if they have something that will read QR codes.
Today was our first day and it was awesome. We are using our guided reading time because we have more adults available. The kids picked what they wanted to research and so everyone in the group is researching the same symbol. Each group has 1 iPad and today they scanned the QR codes and got their information. Tomorrow they will make their poster/triarama and Thursday they will decide on a way to present the information they have learned to the entire first grade. They can create a commercial, song, chant, or any other idea as long as it gives information about their symbol. We will then watch them next week on Kansas Day.
I'm sure that we will find ways to improve what we are doing this year but we're excited about trying something different. Any ideas you might have about how to improve this would be greatly appreciated. Happy Birthday Kansas!
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