2nd Graders Create "My Life As A Reader" Digital Timelines...

For the past week or two, Oak Hills 2nd Graders have been gathering images of books they remember reading throughout their lives.  (I wrote about our Google searches in a post entitled 2nd Graders Learn To Search.)  Some of our 2nd graders were able to remember books from when they were tiny, while others were only able to remember a few of their early books, but they could all remember books they read this year.  It was a great starting point.    

We brainstormed some possible early books that students might all remember.  I was amazed at how many remembered Goodnight Moon!  That was a nightly favorite at our house when my children were young, so I should have expected it to be a favorite for my students too!! Also, almost all of them remembered at least one Eric Carle book!  

My second graders amazed me during this entire lessson!!  As a parent and teacher, I have never really thought of young children as being very sentimental.  I always assumed that sentimental emotions come with age, after having lived long enough to have lingering memories.  But when we began talking about their earliest memories of books, I was struck by how sentimental our 2nd graders were when they thought back to their early books.  There were lots of "Awwwww" and "I Looooved That One"!  Clearly our Oak Hills parents did a great job of connecting our students to reading at a very early age!!  Hopefully this timeline demonstrates to our 2nd graders that they are readers for life!!!

Students loved it when I shared memories of my very first book.  I remember studying the pictures in The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton for what seemed like hours!!  I had no idea what a Caldecott Medal was at the time.  I just loved the changes in seasons and environments I could see in the pictures!!  When I think of this book I am immediately transported back in time to my early childhood...sounds, smells, family and my room, complete with shag carpeting :)

We created our timelines in the timeline creator on the ReadThinkWrite website.  It was the perfect tool for students to be able to create their digital timelines!  Students could add titles and images to their timelines.  We saved their digital timeline to their Google Drive for safe keeping and future publication!