During the week following our first collaborative session, we continued to talk about our favourite books. One of my inquiry focuses is on making students' learning experiences authentic by designing LCS projects based on their interests and taking into account their identities. During this project, we put students' interests at the centre of their learning and I believe this approach inspired our young learners to create many wonderful written texts, art and digital objects.
Reflecting on our class identities, It was very interesting to observe how different classes focused on different aspects of LCS. One of the classes discussed the story elements and created their own characters and settings in response to the book they'd selected. I believe they now aim for rewriting the 'model text' and creating their own book! The students started to work on some illustrations. How exciting was to see such creative writers and artists!
My class decided to use one of the famous book characters and completely change the settings of the story! We brainstormed a lot of problems and solutions, wrote a number of short plays, acted them out and performed to the other classes last Friday. I promote the use of drama techniques to support literacy learning. I believe it makes reading and writing activities more engaging and meaningful for students, enhances critical and creative thinking skills, thus I hope it will help my students to formulate and express ideas and opinions.
Our Y2-3 students were highly engaged and motivated. They were proud to present what they had created and tried their best sharing authentic learning experiences. Our next step is to do some blog posts sharing our project with a wider audience and connecting our learners online. Teachers will plan for shared writing lessons to write smart comments on the other class blogs and then allow our students to leave more smart positive personal comments.
I am excited to share that today my class has completed the publication of their book that we started work on in response to the Learn Create Share day led by Elena in Week 2. Though our timeline was upset by lockdown, including us not being able to celebrate book week, upon return to school we picked up with our project again. Though I was admittedly a bit overwhelmed at the start of the project (I was new to the school too), Elena supported me through initial planning steps and I can now reflect on the term's work and am proud to acknowledge not just the final products (book and play) but also the authentic learning experiences the children have undertaken to get to this point. The integrated nature of the project has meant every student was able to not only participate but to find a topic area that they were really interested in and support their learning progress. While we have worked through many curriculum areas, many other areas of learning have developed including student agency, teamwork, problem solving and confidence. The children have worked very well together and have supported each other in their learning and are now very keen to share their outcomes with the two classes they started their project with.
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