Teacher’s names: Ethel Magnani & Kevin O’Donnell
Grade level: 5
School: Boyle Road ES
School District: Comsewogue
We used our Cyberlesson as a whole class activity, combining two fifth grade classes for the Cyberlesson.. All of the completed work was prepared in pairs. Our Cyberlesson was a read aloud picture book titled, Pink & Say written by Patricia Polacco. The activity took three days.
The Cyberlesson was a nice fit with our Social Studies and Language Arts curriculum. The Civil War is an important part of our history and taught the children the horrors of war. Their language arts skills were improved by students describing, interpreting, reflecting, analyzing, and writing in order to extend their understanding of the story.
The students really enjoyed the project. They enjoyed the story and were moved by its theme. Interestingly, the KWL assignment was eagerly completed by each group. The letter writing assignment on character traits was as equally successful. The students enjoyed conferring together and agreeing to the contents in the letter. The KWL (by some students) and letter writing were completed on the computer. Each pair of students took turns sharing the typing. The students enjoyed the beyond the reading project and students responded appropriately in their Reader’s Notebook. The student’s comments were positive as to the additional learning they experienced concerning the book and author.
Our project stayed on schedule. We did encounter a minor setback in the letter writing process. We utilized a letter writing generator on the Internet and soon found that you have to generate the letter in one sitting since the letter generator does not have the capacity to save the letter. Another setback was the KWL generator was only available in a particular software version. Therefore, only a few students were able to generate their KWL on the computer.
Overall, we were thrilled with the Cyberlesson. Our students liked the new learning style.