Global Vocabulary A-Z Project!

Educational blogging offers many rewards! 

The collaborative learning connections that can occur when the classroom walls are flattened are rich and engaging for all learners, teachers included! 

Here is a slide show documenting an international vocabulary building project between our third grade class in California and our blogging buddies in England, A Room With a View. This fabulous A-Z Twitter project was the idea of  Catherine Monaghan. This literacy project integrates dictionary skills, Twitter, Google Presentations, and blogging.

Here is a blog post about the project.

Enjoy!

What was your favorite word?

What do you think of this type of global project?

Students and friends, use a high-level word or two in your comment! Let's keep learning!  

(Use html code to bold your word.)

Holiday Party ~ 2013

On the last school day of the year (the 2013 year that is), we had a great holiday party!

There was a cookie decorating station.

Beautiful designs were created by all!

Pupils tried their luck at the dreidel station! 

Spin, dreidel, spin!  

The final station involved marshmallows. There were a few challenges: pick up as many marshmallows as possible with a straw, make as many snowmen as you can in a minute, and the marshmallow team toss.

Healthy snacks were enjoyed by all!

At the end of the day, we recorded a special flutophone song for Mrs. Monaghan and our blogging buddies in England who celebrate Christmas! We've been working on a Twitter Vocabulary A-Z project with them this semester. 

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Over the winter break, read or contribute a fun story on 
Buck's Holiday House!

Check out the interesting interactive winter links on this post. 


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 Thank you to all of our readers for your support and for the quality comments you contribute throughout the year!

Have a wonderful holiday break!

Valuable Vocabulary : Tweeting A-Z

Twitter offers many educational opportunities!

Two weeks ago, we started a collaborative project via Twitter with our English blogging buddies in Mrs. Monaghan's class. 

For 26 days, the students will tweet out interesting vocabulary words they would like to share with their cohort. (Wow! That's an impressive word! Students, what exactly is a cohort?)

Welcome to Vocabulary Tweets A-Z

Each school day, students will work with a new letter of the alphabet. Pupils will brainstorm words that begin with the letter-of-the-day and a final word-of-the-day will be tweeted out. Words come from independent reading, curricular content, or our good friend, the dictionary! 

Dictionary skills are strengthened via these Twitter tasks! 

Brainstorming Examples:

D

E

Each tweet includes the word, part of speech, and a definition or context clue.  (Context clues are the words around an unknown word that help a reader unlock a word's meaning.) 

Here was the first tweet from Mrs. Monaghan's class:

A

And then they offered another A...

We responded with our first tweet! 

A is for alliteration! 

B

C

We've been using the hashtag #vocabaz to keep track of our words!

A HUGE thank you to Mrs. Monahgan and her class for thinking of the project and working with us on this transatlantic enterprise – it’s a great verbal work-out for the start of our day

Join us in our tweets – tweet us with your own alphabetical contributions using #vocabaz to:

@yollisclass

@middlehamclass2 

What are some valuable vocabulary words you like?

What other projects could be done using Twitter?

Educational Tweeting!

I love to learn alongside my students. A few years ago I started exploring the educational value of Twitter. I created a classroom Twitter account (@YollisClass) and started thinking about how we could use it in the classroom. 

                      

Our first tweet was September 2, 2010!

I've used Twitter to define concepts. 

Here students tweeted out the 4 types of sentences. Students enjoyed tweeting these out and had access to the sentence types in the Twitter feed.

Students then took turns trying to tweet out example sentences! 

The class used Twitter to chronicle a Mystery Skype call! 

This week, my class has been exchanging tweets with a fabulous class in England, Mrs. Monaghan and her class 2! 

Mrs. Monaghan wrote a post about our Twitter exchange on her Room With a View blog! This British class is experimenting with having a class Twitter account too. 

Our exchange started with this math tweet. My third graders are learning about multiplication and arrays. My class shot a photo of an array in our classroom. The array was our fish bulletin board. As you can see,  there are 2 rows of ten fish and a bottom row of 7. Next, we used Skitch to annotate the photo. We invited other classes to share an array from their classroom. Here is the tweet:

Mrs. Monaghan's class (@class2middleham) tweeted this tweet to us! Like us, they used Skitch to annotate their photo.

 

And then they tweeted this screenshot of an array from their blog sidebar! 

We looked forward to tweeting back. Each time we included their @class2middleham Twitter handle so our English friends would be alerted about our new array. 

Mia's birthday cupcakes were the most delicious of all the arrays!

I added a fun twist when I created a collage array using my adorable dog, Buck! :-)

 

          You can find our Twitter feed in the sidebar of our blog. 

               From there, you can scroll through past tweets.

Are you using Twitter in your classroom? 

If so, join our Hip Hip Array fun!

How do you use Twitter with your students?

What advice to you have to make our Twitter experience meaningful and efficient?