After the class on students being a global communicator, I realized how easy it is to spend our lives oblivious of how our choices impact others and how dependent we all are on each other. My biggest takeaway from this lecture was creating awareness. In second grade, children can be introduced to different perspectives and begin to understand that there are different cultures and ways people live.
While reading through this chapter, I realized how lucky we are in this day and age to be able to communicate with others all over the word. There are websites designed to help students from different countries to connect, there are numerous applications designed for people to call, chat, and video with people from anywhere that has an internet connection. In this time, it is so easy for us to reach out and talk with people from anywhere. As someone with friends in other countries, I have realized that one way to learn about a different country is to talk to the people who live there. Reading articles and doing research provides valuable insight but talking with people who live there provides an interesting snapshot that an article cannot recreate and perspective that research may not deliver.
This idea would tie in well to the unit I discussed in my previous blog post. After learning the difference between primary and secondary sources, my students would have to utilize their knowledge on sources. They could do this utilizing this social studies standard; 2.T.4.3: Locate and analyze information and present a short research report on the physical features, resources, and people of a country outside the United States.
I know early childhood educators in England and Denmark that I could collaborate with. Students would be divided into 4 groups of 5-6 students. 2 groups would focus on England while the other 2 would focus on Denmark. Each student would focus on one topic (natural features, resources, people, animals, etc.) and the groups would be responsible for coming up with topical questions for their country. I would provide a list of these questions to the students in Denmark or England prior to the interview. This would allow them time to construct their answers and be prepared for the interview. When the interview happens, students would each have a job as they talk with students in another country as the interviewer, note taker, recorder, or photographer. Students could then use Skype to communicate. I enjoy Skype because it is a video and messaging application all in one. This means that students can message each other when they are offline and respond at a later time. I feel this would make managing the time difference easier, it would allow students to communicate more frequently, and would make asking simple follow up questions easier. Despite having access to the messaging feature through Skype, I can see students needing to speak with the other class more than once. They may come up with more questions or need more information for their presentation than can be conveyed by a second grader over messenger so I would arrange for multiple meetings ahead of time. I would have one group interview at a time so that I could monitor the conversations. Students would use the information they collect as their primary source.
For a secondary source, students would use a custom google search I create to find resources to answer their questions using sites like NatGeo, Google Lit Quiz, Stack the Countries, etc. While I would begin to talk to students about reliable resources, I feel like at this age it is important that students have safe resources. Students would then work together as a group to create a presentation to share with the class. Students could use VoiceThread to create their presentation. Some students will feel comfortable writing, others typing, and others speaking and VoiceThread gives all students the opportunity to present information in a way they are comfortable with. We would then watch all of the presentations as a class and students could ask each group questions after their portion of the presentation.
Each student would be graded on their potion of the presentation. They would be responsible for answering a certain number of questions and need to use one primary and one secondary source in their answers. Their secondary source has to be referenced. The rubric would also require presentations to be well put together and their portion of the presentation should be well written or spoken.
Obviously this project would take more than one lesson to complete. Students would first research their country, students would then come up with questions to ask their international peers, students would then arrange their answers into presentations, work on their presentation, and finally present. I feel that this is an engaging assignment and would help get students interested in other parts of the world. In future lessons, we would explore places students have a personal connection to and cultures that vary greatly from our own. This will help students to build a foundation and hopefully lead them to be more understanding about different cultures and interested in meeting and learning about people outside of the US.
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