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Driving Question: "How can we, as second-graders, help our kindergarteners learn about schools and why they are important?"
Project Description Students developed their literacy and citizenship skills as they engaged in a study of schools around the world. We launched our project when we received a list of questions about school from our incoming kindergartners. After, we created our driving question and brainstormed ways we could help our kindergarteners. Students built their understanding of schools by participating in close read-alouds of the text, "Off to Class: Incredible and Unusual Schools Around the World" by Susan Hughes. We learned about schools around the world and the challenges some communities face in sending their kids to school, and how those communities solve those problems. Products After learning about schools in Brazil, Haiti, and Bangladesh, students chose one school to research further before publishing an informational book, "The Most Important Thing About Schools", comparing their research school to Lake Elementary. We were inspired by the fictional text, "The Important Book" by Margaret Brown, and each of us wanted to include one thing we think makes schools so important in our own book. To make our writing high quality, we critiqued an informational text to establish criteria for our own books. Included in the book are portraits of our Lake community, ideal spaces we designed for our school, and photos of the schools we researched. As we created our artwork, students developed their "artist's toolbelt" by adding important qualities such as scale, perspective, and shapes. A copy of our book is displayed in the front office at Lake Elementary, for visitors to learn about our school and other schools around the world. Exhibition To celebrate our learning we shared our books with the kindergarteners, and performed a Reader's Theater about the three different schools we researched around the world. Students worked on speaking with fluency and expression to make their performance engaging. |