Monday, May 12, 2014

2nd Graders Use Their Research To Respond Via Flipgrid!


This week, 2nd graders are finishing their great leaders research. Their research is outlined in two of my earlier posts - Rethinking, Revamping and Revisiting Research and 2nd Graders Find Inspiration For Research From Isabella and Alexander.

To summarize -  We read the books My Name Is Not Alexander and My Name Is Not Isabella by Jennifer Fosberry, illustrated by Mike Litwin. Both books gave students a glimpse at a few great leaders, all of whom have made a contribution to the world! After browsing through Kids Infobits, students selected a great leader that they might like to research!  For our research, we used a combination of Kids Infobits and Biography.com.


This week we have finished with our research, along with our citations, so I decided it would be fun to have students use the pattern from the My Name Is Not...series to record themselves and share their research with each other using Flipgrid! 

The pattern is as follows...

"I am Sally, the greatest, toughest astronaut who ever was!"

"I am Rosa, the greatest, bravest activist who ever was!"

Quick Side Note - For readers of my blog, you may have noticed a great deal of Flipgrid use in recent blog posts.  It isn't your imagination!  I have fallen in love with this tool and I want to get as much use from it as possible! Flipgrid offers free teacher options for 21 days and I am in my last week of this "free period".  I don't want to pay the fee as we are at the end of the school year, so my plan is to pay the fee of $45 at the beginning of next school year!  I do think it is worth the fee, but not at the beginning of the summer.  I am just trying to squeeze out as many opportunities for my students to experience this tool before Friday!!!

Using Flipgrid, students responded to the following prompt:  Pretend to be the great leader you researched and tell us about yourself!! (Like Isabella and Alexander!) 

Their responses were fantastic! They demonstrated their learning and shared it with each other!

Here are just a few of our great leaders!  Enjoy!