Touring Canada

We had a lot of success with our #postcardproject and learned about a lot of different communities in Canada. Now we are using that learning along with Tellagami to create a virtual tour of Canada! Each student will create a gami with 30 seconds worth of the information they got on their postcard. The full details of each location can also be seen on our Google Map of Canada.

Here are some of our gamis!

Mystery Skype Call

We have been practicing and preparing for our first Mystery Skype call! Finally the day is here and we will have our call this afternoon. We think we are all set.

We will use Skype to connect with a class somewhere else in the world. We will have to ask them yes or no questions to figure out where they are. This ties perfectly in with our recent explorations of Manitoba and Canada. We have been receiving postcards from people we know around Canada giving us information about their communities. The community we will connect with today is one of them!

We will use paper maps that are laminated so we can write on them as we narrow down our guess. We will also have a Google map up on our projector that we can move and zoom in on as we narrow it down. We have practiced starting with general questions and then getting more specific as we hone in on a region. The questions have to be yes or no questions. Some questions we might ask are:
"Are you in the north or south part of Canada?"
"Are you in the east or west part of Canada?"
"Are you in the province/territory ...?"
"Are you in the north or south part of the province?"
"Are you in the east or west part of  the province?"
"Are you close to water?"
"Is your home urban?"

We are super excited to connect with another class this way!

Update:
The call was a huge success! We asked really smart questions and narrowed it down quickly, just like we practiced. Some kids sat at the paper maps, some took photos, some asked questions, some wrote down the answers and some focused on the Google map. Everyone was totally engaged. We will totally do this again!

Seeing and hearing the students run the call, ask smart questions and be involved in their own way was so exciting for me. I love it when all the little parts of an inquiry or project come together and the kids have a really neat way to show me what they know. They applied what they have worked through this year in so many ways. Huge win!

#postcardproject

This year in Social Studies we have been learning about our community and comparing our community with other cities. Now we are ready to learn about lots of other communities in Canada during our current unit - The Canadian Community. We are looking for LOTS of information and we hope you can help.

We would like Canadians from other parts of Canada to send us a postcard from their community. On the postcard we would like them to tell us information about their part of Canada. We have brainstormed a list of questions we are interested in asking other Canadians. If you are interested in sharing with us, leave us a comment below. We can communicate by email, snail mail, Google Hangout or Skype.
We posted about the project on Instagram and have some more folks that are going to connect with us too! You can find us @terrifictwos.
As the postcards start coming in we will post the locations and the facts we learn to our Google Map. Each pin on the map will show a location where we know someone and when you click on it, the information they sent us will pop up. We will also post them in our classroom on our wall map of Canada.
We will keep sharing here on the progress of the project so stay tuned!

The letter we sent to our fellow Canadians

The questions we generated to ask them! We each highlighted the ones that are important to us and asked our person those questions.