Videoscribing ‘Writing to Describe’: My last project with @Grade1class

Sadly, Im moving. Not schools but grade levels. I love teaching Grade 1 and have done so for the last 5 years. Im happy to be going to Grade 3 next academic year, new experiences. So I had to try one last thing with my Grade 1 kids or as we are known on Twitter and to our small PLN:  @grade1class. We’ve made loads of connections we are all over Twitter and had some VERY cool projects and collaborations this year. You can see our collaborative blog here.  I’ve also blogged about the things we’ve done on my COETAIL blog here. Id like to thank those in my PLN who have helped me this year. You know who you are.

So our last project this year in our Sharing the Planet unit had the central idea: Organisms are challenged when competing for finite resources. 

We wanted to do something meaningful with our writing genre Writing to Describe by showcasing our research skills. So after our finding out, sorting out, gathering and sorting data and understanding it, it was time to present it. In the past few years the kids chose VoiceThread, a great tool for collaboration and feedback. Not a lot of time this year so we looked at a few tools and chose Videoscribe, an RSA Animate  tool.

As a language focus, we began by looking at model texts, annotated examples of Writing to Describe. We deconstructed sample texts and had some guided practice. We broke it into chunks, learned about adjectives and structure.

We then used our research, information we found after learning about how to research (KidRex.org is a great kid friendly search engine by the way) and we recorded our findings on a chart once we decided about what we wanted to find out.

When we were ready to start our final product after a few tries at practising Writing to Describe, we negotiated  a checklist on the key features of what writing to explain was all about.

Next we had a go and wrote the piece using our information chart from our previous research.

We wanted to show others what we found out, and VoiceThread was not really an option this year so I showed the kids a few options and they thought Videoscribe was cool. I knew it was also a pretty easy  tool to use and we had the iPad App already. The kids then proceeded to transfer their knowledge onto the Videoscribe and then read out their writing sample of Writing to Describe as a voiceover.

This is their final presentation.

That was it in a nutshell, of course a lot of scaffolding and differentiation happened over the 5 weeks we had been working on this.

Bye @grade1class, you guys rock. Thanks so much.