Our grade one classes are spreading love and friendship across the border. Students worked hard creating special messages for some new friends in the states of North Carolina, South Carolina and Colorado. The students connected with each other through an online project called ‘Virtual Valentines’ found through Twitter at http://virtualvalentines.weebly.com/. Fossil’s students asked questions about their partner classes and were eagerly awaiting the answers to arrive before the weekend.
On Friday morning, our students were greeted with not only the survey complete but short videos of happy bouncing students and students showing their own Valentine creations. The grade ones compared the answers to their own class, looking at the differences and commonalities between the classes. The findings were:
Commonalities
- We both have computers, SMARTBoard and gym in our schools.
- We each have 20 students in the classroom.
- We both do not have any classroom pets.
Differences
- They only speak English at home, and we do not all speak English at home
- They have dogs as pets.
- We have different names than them
This is the video Ms. Stuart’s Class sent to their Virtual Valentine’s in Asheville, North Carolina.
After Ms. Stuart’s class watched the video, her class had the opportunity to have a Google Hangout with their Virtual Valentine’s, Ms. Engel’s grade 1 class from Asheville, North Carolina. We were then able to ask and answer more questions that the students wondered about each other- and learned we had even more in common than we could have thought! We both do Daily 5 in our classrooms, we both are learning how to write opinions and we even do some of the same sports. An exciting difference that we discovered was that the students in North Carolina also have a gardening class in a greenhouse at their school, and they even grow their own vegetables and cook with them at school.
By involving our students in positive and meaningful global connections, our goal is to guide our young learners towards developing global competence in an ever increasing modern world.
