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Activity Summary
Throughout the course of this project, students will share information about themselves and the state in which they live in order to further develop an understanding of the geography and economy of their state while also determining why someone would want to live there. They will create a series of written correspondence to a student who lives in another state. They will write two letters and create one newsletter. Through their writing, they will have the opportunity to inform, persuade, and entertain.
Curriculum Related Goals
This project incorporates standards from the Maryland State Curriculum including Social Studies and Writing. Students will be able to identify aspects of Maryland’s geography and economy and provide specific examples to share with another student. Students will also be able to show understanding of the purposes for writing including writing to inform, to persuade, and to entertain.
Fourth Grade Social Studies Standards:
Geography- 3.A.1.b, 3.A.1.c, 3.B.1.b, 3.B.1.c
Economics- 4.A.4.a, 4.B.1.a, 4.B.1.b
Fourth Grade Writing Standards:
Writing - 4.A.2.c, 4.A.2.d
Similar Online Projects
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Personal Narrative Project - created by Jessica Lura: Bullis Charter School, Los Altos, California, United States
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Activity Structure
This activity is based around correspondence between students who live in different states. Through this activity they will share information about themselves and the state in which they live in order to futher understand the history, geography, culture, economy, and agriculture of their state.
This project is meant to be completed on a one-to-one class basis. I would be looking for one class to serve as the partner for my class. Hopefully, all of the other fourth grade teachers at my school would also be looking to participate in this activity. In that case, I would be looking for three schools so we would each have a partner school. I would also encourage other teachers to use this activity with a partner class as well. Once a class has registered for the activity, they will receive confirmation of their participation. We would then need to discuss the means by which students would share information. My initial suggestion would be to have students save their work and email letters to the other classroom teacher. If possible we could post student work on a class website so that the other students could view their work that way.
View my Telecollaboration Planner to view the details of this project.
Read more about the Writing Activities.
If you would like to see the organizers students in Maryland would use to complete this project, they are linked below.
Letter 1 , Letter 2 , Letter 3
Advertising Plan
In order to find participants for my project, I would post the details of the project on the following sites: Classroom Connect, Global Schoolhouse, KIDPROJ, NickNacks!: Find Telecollaborators, and/or ePALS. I would also share this project with other teachers at my school and possibly at other schools in the area to see if they are interested in getting their own partner school. If other schools were interested in participating, I would advertise the project so that they would each have a partner school.
Interest Action Plan
Once teachers express interest in this project by filling out the proper form on the sites I have used to advertise this project, I would contact them myself to ensure their interest and dedication to the project. I would be sure to match classes up with the appropriate grade level classes. Once all classes have a match, and I have contacted them, registration for the project would close. I would like to be able to give interested teachers the opportunity to send me their contact information if they were not able to participate this year, but would be interested in participating next year.
Communication
In the beginning, communication would primarily be through teacher email. If the other teacher has a class website or the ability to create one, I would eventually prefer that avenue so that students can access their partner's writing without so much teacher interaction. Specific time frames to send each of the three writing activities are outlined in the Telecollaboration Plan, which would be posted when the school registers for the project. This will ensure students have enough time to complete the activity, but is structured enough to ensure that all three activities will be completed.
Closure
To close this project, I would want to get feedback from the students involved in this project as well as the other teacher/teachers. I would have students send one more response email to me to tell me how they like the activity and how it added to their regular writing activities. The teacher may also choose to have a class discussion and email one response if necessary. I would also do the same with my own students and discuss how they think this activity affected their writing performance. Hopefully, by the next year, more teachers at my school would be interested in implementing a similar activity into their plans which would allow me to recruit more schools to participate. I would also explore the option of posting student work on a site where students do not necessarily have an assigned pen pal, but they may choose to read other student's work. This would also allow other schools participating to work with schools in a state other than Maryland.
Exceeding the Requirements
I believe this project exceeds the minimum requirments because of its real world applications. By using the outline for this plan I would be able to introduce this to my students and teammates next year as a possible telecollaborative project for our grade. We would most likely need to institute this the following year to allow time for other schools to register, however I have included all of the details we would need. There is a link on this page to my Telecollaborative Planner, which goes in to detail about this project. There are also links to further directions for teachers as well as graphic organizers the students would use. I could easily make these generic for any school to use. I feel that this site is neatly done and attractive. I believe this project is a high quality product that is realistic for implementation in my school.
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This page was last updated on July 30, 2007