Using the #GRA15 to cover Ontario curriculum 5-7

It's not easy to embark on new adventures, especially when you might be on your own, so it's awesome when you find a partner in crime.

For full video from Bernd Geropp ▶ 1:53

My wonderful college @mrsjacker4 is going outside of her comfort level with this task. She is one of the best teachers I've ever worked with and I want to make this experience as worthwhile, and assessment rich for both of us. We are focussing on oral communication expectations as well as reading strategies and we are hoping our students meet their learning goals.

We will not be able to blog with other classrooms, although we could use the blog feature on D2L for our students to blog with each other. Since I have the 6/7 and she has the 5/6 we may have some takers who want to connect with their friends from the other class. After some diagnostic assessments, I found that as a class, my students need to work on using evidence from the text to prove their predictions and connections. They also need some explicit lessons on genre, which I hope to cover using the independent reading incentive monthly reading log in our D2L discussion forum.

From the Ontario Curriculum, the overall oral communication expectations are exactly the same across all grades 1-8.

Looking at the specific expectation more closely we get this. We are hoping to Skype with other classes as well as connect via Twitter. We will also be doing small group and large group discussions. While the students listen to the story, I will ask them to jot their ideas on sticky notes and they may also respond to this. There are also several documents floating around in social media with other ideas. I may extend it for my grade 7s by choosing other oral texts describing the refugee crisis and events happening right now.

Here's the weekly breakdown. We will be reading Fish and the author has already connected with us via Twitter. Thank you @LauraDron! Before we decided on anything, we had to check with our librarian to ensure the book was acceptable to use with our classes.