Help me give my students 10 Chromebooks so they can take on the perspectives of characters who could have lived four hundred years ago in what's now New York City.
When you walk into our classroom, you will see a racially and economically diverse group of students, working together, talking, sharing ideas and challenging each other to learn and grow. The group is academically mixed, with some children performing well above grade level, and some for whom academic learning is difficult. Children with learning differences are fully integrated into the life of the classroom, and an outside observer would not be able to tell who is struggling academically and who is not. Because students have different strengths and learn in different ways, we create opportunities for students to both learn and express their knowledge in multiple ways. We value cooperative learning and children work together on projects to expand and demonstrate their knowledge.
My Project
Picture this: a classroom of fourth graders, hard at work, bent over Chromebooks, busily writing. An excited hum pervades as children exchange ideas, read pieces of their work to each other and ask to try out bits of dialogue on each other. This is my classroom, hard at work on their end of the year historical fiction journals.
Creating a historical fiction journal is hard work and I have found that using a Chromebook to write, helps my students revise, edit and share their work.
They are able to use this tool to comment on each others' work, thereby strengthening both their own and their classmates' writing.
Fourth grade is all about New York City history in my classroom. We engage in our study through reading, trips, learning from visiting experts, building models, role playing and finally, through writing. Learning about historical events is grounded in a deep study of the lives of the various peoples who lived in and around New York. The study then goes on to examine the interactions between these different groups of people and the impact they had on each other. In the last few months of the school year, students use all they have learned in reading, writing and social studies to create an original character who might actually have lived in or around New Amsterdam in the 1600's. They incorporate historically accurate details, dialogue and information to write a series of letters which tell a simple story that teaches about the time period. The use of a Chromebook to complete this project greatly enhances my students' ability to organize, revise and edit their work.
More than a third of students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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