Thursday, March 15, 2012

Week 3: Florida


This week we read a book donated by Avery's family on Our Global World.  Then, we had our first Skype experience!  We "called" our friends in Minnesota!  We were able to see them all in their classroom working.  However, we were unable to hear their voices.  We had to quickly improvise and decided to ask them yes or no questions to get a "thumbs up" or a "thumbs down!"  Though this would seem like it was an unsuccessful attempt to communicate, we discovered that if we were faced with communicating with friends globally that may not speak the same language, we would have to find different ways to express ourselves!  Our questions for our friends were:
Kavi: What languages do you learn at your school?
Michael: What after school activities does your school have?
Giovanni: How many classrooms are in your school?



Then, to finish our Flat Classroom Meeting, we decided to sing some favorite songs for our international friends!

WEEK 3

This week, we had a wonderful skype meeting with our Honk Kong friends.


 We wondered how our friends play during free play time? In addition, we also want to know what do you do in a school day? Firstly, we prepared a video about our free play time. There are photos while we are playing. We make a plan to take a video that show our school day.


 
Make your own slide show at Animoto.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Week 2

While we were watching your videos we decided to draw some pictures to our friends that tells something about us. Also, we find your places via google earth. Your countries are so far from us. In addition, we explored that earth is round and when we were at school you were sleeping. This was surprizing! Pectures for you on PhotoPeach

Week 1

Hello from Turkey Our hands to shake Our hand printings on PhotoPeach

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Week 2

My creation



For Week 2, at Country Day we had students locate our new friends' locations and find out several types of information:
1. temperature in F
2. weather
3. time
4. time zone

We were surprised to find that Hong Kong was the warmest of the four cities.  We were not shocked to see that Minnesota had the coldest temperatures.  Mrs. Metka gave a Montessori lesson on time zones using a flashlight to represent the sun and a globe to represent Earth.  This shows how one side of the Earth is bright from the Earth's light, but the other side is in darkness at night!
Untitled from Jennifer Williams on Vimeo.
We used www.tripline.net to create a fictional "trip" to see our new friends!  We wrote about the weather in each of our "stops!"
 

Week 1

Week 1 of our Flat Classroom Project began with a "handshake." Each classes was asked to create a virtual introduction to allow students to meet each other.  As a Montessori class, we decided to integrate our cultural materials which include Montessori maps and globes.  We also utilized various technology told such as iPads, iPods, Flipcams, laptops, and Web 2.0 told such as VoiceThread.  Here is our Country Day Handshake to our friends!





As an extension activity, the Kindergarten groups came together to locate the countries.  We decided to make handprints with various shades of paint.  The 1st graders cut out the hands today and we will be mailing them to our friends this week!


My creation