Resource Sharing: Wonderopolis

Wonderopolis is a site whose goal is to promote curiosity, questioning,and inquiry. New topics are posted each day to wonder about and explore. It's worth a daily visit for families to spark interesting conversations and learning opportunities at home:

"Our Wonders of the Day will help you find learning moments in everyday life, ones that fit in with dinner preparations or carpool responsibilities or a stolen moment between breakfast and the bus."

It's a great classroom resource too. Take a look at this approach:  Wonderopolis and Question Writing from 'Teaching in the 21st Century' Blog. This is a valuable source of online non-fiction articles to build reading comprehension and inferential thinking.
Some recent 'wonders' to explore:

• Why are school buses yellow?
• What's a tsunami?
• How does a species become endangered?

Skype in the Classroom

Signing up for 'Skype in the Classroom' is a great way to connect with an online international community of educators. We can expand our students' international mindedness through building relationships and exchanging ideas with students and teachers all over the world! Teachers first create a profile that sets out their interests, specialties, and location. Then, they are able to browse the community for teachers who they can help or who can offer them help in making cultural connections and instructional exchanges, or even practicing a new language with native speakers! Register now and get started by clicking here.

Additional Reading & Technology resources:

Fluency (including many anchor charts and examples of fluency instruction)

• Having Fun with Fluency: A Bridge to Comprehension (Part I) 
• Having Fun With Fluency: Strategies Readers Will Enjoy (Part II)
  (via Scholastic's 'Top Teaching' blog)

Keyboarding

• Create a Keyboarding Learning Station using these downloadable practice cards from (ICT Teaching and Learning blog)

IBPYP Exhibition

Website by Elizabeth, Aarohi, and Maya about Service Animals

Exhibition is a demonstration of students' learning of key concepts within the IBPYP curriculum framework. It is an intense, multi-step, multi-layered process, and students' success provides evidence of every aspect of the Learner Profile. It not only shows students' development of transdisciplinary research and social skills but also their communication and self-management abilities too. It is a testament to learning that has happened not only in 5th grade, but in each grade level that has come before. 

Exhibition work is student-led and requirements involve research, writing, technology and taking action as an extension of learning. The role of mentors has been essential to ensuring student's receive much needed support. The quality of students' work is also directly connected to our teachers' ability to balance strategic guidance and intervention at the point of need while at the same time ensuring students' own what they are learning and are given the tools to steer their own course. 

Students designed lines of inquiry and investigated self-selected topics in connection to the central idea: 'Action impacts our community and our world.' Pre-search experiences gave kids the opportunity to choose topics they were truly passionate about. Working in collaborative teams, 5th graders developed questions and lines of inquiry through concept mapping. They used multiple sources to gather research information in the form of notefacts, and cited sources along the way. Organizing notefacts at the midpoint of research was key in order to identify gaps and unanswered questions, and then research resumed to address these. Students also brainstormed, developed, and implemented 'action' plans. Kids experienced first-hand that they could make a difference in our community in relation to their chosen issue.

To synthesize understandings from their research, students wrote essays to summarize what they'd learned and then began developing presentation ideas and planning products incorporating technology. Next, they transformed their gathered research information into a range of original creative products, a few of which are embedded above and below. They used BibMe to finalize their bibliographies, and teachers coached and guided teams in delivering their final presentations in ways that both engaged and informed their wide audience of families, community members, and students from every classroom throughout our school. 

Just a few examples of ROE Exhibition 2011 products created by students are posted here. Many links to other phenomenal work continue to be added HERE.

 An animated presentation about Parkinson's Disease by Jackson and Robby (created with Prezi)-Note: Click arrow to load and view presentation.

An e-Book to inform River Oaks students about Autism by Ilona and Alexandra (created with VoiceThread)--Note: Click on  students' avatars to hear voice recordings page by page.

A Multimedia Pop-up Book about Ocean Pollution including original illustrations by Corbin, Joann, and Warren (created with Zooburst)--Note: Click small ''show more' arrows above story text on each page for additional text & click exclamation points above images for thought bubbles.

Technology Timeline on Dipity.

An Interactive Timeline about Technology by Beckett and Stuart (created with Dipity). Note: Click any timeline label for more description of events. 

A Multimedia Poster about Alzheimer's Disease by Will and Sabrina (created with GlogsterEdu)


Find additional links to projects HERE .