What's New at the Zoo?

We just wrapped our our last PBL of the year.  While I have enjoyed all of our PBL experiences this year, I think this one is my personal favorite!  The staff at the zoo were absolutely wonderful with the students.  Check out the blog the Dallas Zoo wrote about our experience here.  

Mayor of Our Classroom

Who's Afraid of The Big Bad Wolf?

Our class has been collaborating with Carol McLaughlin's class from Alabama in a Project Based Learning (PBL) challenge.  Ms. McLaughlin and I met on a Twitter Chat (#2ndchat) several months ago.  The topic of the chat was engaging science lessons and we decided to collaborate to complete a PBL Ms. McLaughlin has already started to plan.  After a couple Saturday afternoon Skype sessions and numerous tweets, we had laid out the framework for our PBL.  During this project, our classes kept in contact with each other through Twitter and Skype.  

Our Driving Question was: 

How can we, as second grade real estate developers, design, build, and market the cheapest home that will protect the three little pigs from the big bad wolf?

Our entry event included reading stories about the three little pigs and watching a video of students designing a home.  

Student groups then listed out what they knew and needed to know and created our PBL board.  

Next, students were given a list of materials they could use to build their homes along with a price list for each item.  

Then students designed tests with the individual items to see how they would stand up to wind created as the wolf huffed and puffed. 

After testing, groups met to discuss what they had learned about the individual materials.  They realized that they would not be able to build their houses with just one of the items on the list, they would need to combine materials.  

Students had individual thinking time to brainstorm how they would like to build their homes and then student groups met.  After much discussion and compromise a single house design for the group was decided upon.  

Then the shopping began.  Students had to calculate and keep track of construction costs.  

After their initial construction, groups could test their houses to see how it would stand up to the huffing and puffing of our big bad wolf and make any modifications they wanted.  

Finally, we were ready for the final test to see how their house would stand up to the wind.  You can see our results here.  

Next we had to learn more about how to market our homes to the three little pigs.  We invited Kathryn Schuetts, a local real estate agent in to teach us how she helps potential buyers find homes.  

Mrs. Schuetts met with each team and gave them feedback and asked guiding questions to help them think through how to publicize their home.  

Here are our presentations for the pigs

To prepare for our presentations each group presented their projects to our class.  Students used the project rubric to give them feedback.  

The three little pigs visited our classroom.  They gave each team feedback on their projects and then selected the home that best fit their needs.  

We enjoyed a Skype chat with our friends in Ms. McLaughlin's class.  Students were able to share their home designs and learning.  

Click on the links below for student reflections.

Emerson         Mia          Kathleen         Allan        Serena         Alex          

Morgan          Olivia          SrRyan          Payton          Gianna          Nadia

Caleb Dylan      Sydney     Andrew

Communities PBL

How can we, as community planners, design and construct one of the three types of communities that will meet the needs of the people who will live there?


This was the question that launched our studies of communities.  We had many questions:  

• What were the three types of communities?
• What is a community?
• What do people need from their community?
• What needs to be in our community?
• What kind of community should we build?

During our learning we found the answers to these questions, and found we had many more questions.  Below are pictures of our completed project.  Special thanks to our Twitter learning friends.  As our communities were under construction, we tweeted out pictures and they gave us feedback.  

Urban

Suburban

Rural

Pictures of the construction process:

Digital Citizenship PBL: Learning Safely and Responsibly.

Last week brought a close to our first project based learning experience of the year.  I have recently shared information about launching our PBL, updates on our PBL, and how we collaborated with experts virtually.  After lots of learning and fun, we were ready to share what we had created.  I completely forgot about taking pictures during the presentation, so I am grateful to Su Brusco for sharing this picture with me. 

Click on the image below to see each group's presentation.

The kids did an amazing job during their presentations.  They did the everything from the introduction to facilitating the question and answer session.  I was so proud of them, but more importantly, they were proud of themselves.  

Our class wants to thank the following people who helped and supported us during this learning experience:

Mrs. Brusco and Mrs. Nickols for helping us launch our learning.
Mr. Froese, Mrs. Windham, and Ms Lamb for answering our questions
Ms. Brant for helping us with technology
Mrs. Gwyn and Mrs. Roberts for meeting with us and providing feedback
Ms. Fry, Ms. Casida, Ms. Garrett, and our parents who attended our presentation

While this was a wonderful learning experience, it was also a great deal of fun!

Brining Experts into the Classroom Virtually

As we were working on our Digital Citizenship PBL, the Smart Hawks team realized that they needed more information about using Smartboards safely and responsibly than they were able to find online.  We decided to invite Ms. Heather Lamb with Smart Technologies to Skype with the team so they could learn more.  Mrs. Lamb was so incredibly accommodating and sent the team several documents in advance. The team crafted some questions and were excited to collaborate with Mrs. Lamb.  

When it was time to make the phone call, all I did was was get Skype set up and the team took over from there.  We are so grateful to be learning in this time where technology helps us break down the walls of our classroom.  We also realize how lucky we are to be learning in a district that embraces 21st century skills.  If you would like to learn more about how our district is transforming so "All students enjoy thriving productive lives in a future they create," please visit the Lewisville ISD Strategic Design website.  

Update on our PBL

As I shared before, our class has begun our very first adventure with Project Based Learning this year.  I was out two days this week, attending a workshop, but we still moved forward in our learning.  

Since our last post about our PBL project, we had two visitors come to our class to share their knowledge with us.  

First, Mr. Froese, the director of Educational Technology for our district, came to speak with us about digital learning.  We had lots of questions for him and he had even more for us.  He really helped the kids dig deep in regard to what direction they wanted to move with their projects.  He also gave us ideas for how to frame key words for our online research.  

One of the words on our rubric was creative.  As the kids discussed the rubric, they wondered how they would know if their project were creative.  Mia remembered a lesson Mrs. Windham, our GT teacher had done over creativity so we invited her to come visit us again for a brief review.  She brought FEFO with her and gave us some wonderful information.  She even left a poster she had made to explain what FEFO stood for (Fluency, Elaboration, Flexibility, Originality.)  We will definitely use this as we begin to consider products to share our learning.  

One of our "Needs to Know" questions was How do we know if a website is safe or not?  As a class we are exploring this question (more to come on this in a future blog post.)  Each team of students decided to select one of the tools we use as digital learners and create a product to share with other second graders so they will know how to use these tools safely and responsibly.  Below are our teams.

More to come soon!

Pic Penguins--PicCollage

Twitter Tigers--Twitter

 Bird Bloggers--Kid Blog

FASTTMath Fasties--FASTTMath

Smart Hawks--SmartBoard

Perfect Pals: Puppet Pals

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Launching Our First PBL

Our campus is participating in a common-threaded PBL.  During a recent campus professional learning teachers were challenged to design a project based learning experience around the theme of digital citizenship.  Our team reviewed our technology TEKS and decided to focus on the following TEKS:

5B Comply with acceptable digital safety rules, fair use guidelines, and copyright laws.

3B Use search strategies to access information to guide inquiry

Our driving question is:

How can we, as digital learners, teach other second graders to use technology in a safe and responsible way?

We launched our learning today with an entry event created by some of our district Strategic Design Coaches.  (Thank you Su and Stacey!)

The students were excited to begin their project.  I will continue to blog about our journey.

Project Based Learning

We are getting ready to launch our first Project Based Learning (PBL) experience in two weeks.  I am not going to share exactly what our PBL will be about until we launch it as a class, but in the meantime, below is some information about Project Based Learning if you would like to learn more.

Watch this video

Read this article

8 Essential Elements  for Project-Based Learning