GRA17 Teaching Resource - "The Wild Robot"

(Assignment #3)

The Wild Robot by Peter Brown is a phenomenal book for read-aloud and for cross-curricular activities. This title was one of the books selected to be a part of the 2017 Global Read Aloud and I am working collaboratively with the teachers of two grade 4/5 classes in my school in our debut year of the project. This project is exciting because it brings to the forefront the idea that our students are a part of a global community and making connections help to share different ideas and build understanding.

"Whereas in the past reading was predominantly an individual experience, it has become a more social event by using the digital resources that are readily available to readers. The access to others’ reading lives has created a space for sharing responses to texts on a global platform... Finding out what other readers read, think, and highlight is an important evolution in the reading lives of our students." (Serafini and Youngs, 2013)

In order to enhance the enjoyment of this book and to help the classroom teachers, I created a Padlet to showcase tools and resources to facilitate activities that we are working on together. This both serves as an overview and as a resource base for teachers to go to.

Students will have classroom and library time to work on activities throughout the six week read aloud. Materials are drawn from many sources and will allow for multimodal response to literature by the students. Students will need to access multiple literacies in order to complete tasks run by their classroom teacher and myself. Some examples include examining picture books, graphic novels, videos, or informational websites to compare or reflect on topics from The Wild Robot read-aloud. Meanwhile, weekly discussions and reflections will take place via moderated Padlet and Flipgrid forums.

Many of these activities will engage students in curricular goals across several subjects. The following is a listing from BC's New Curriculum and show how this project pertains to grades 4 and 5 learning goals:
Applied Design, Skills and Technology - Covering aspects of Defining, Ideating, Prototyping, Testing, Making and Sharing
Art - Explore connections to identity, place, culture, and belonging through creative expression
Language Arts - Exploring stories and other texts to help us understand ourselves and make connections to others and to the world
Mathematics - Developing and using multiple strategies to engage in problem solving
Physical and Health Education - Food choices to support active lifestyles and overall health; local and seasonal foods
Science - Experience and interpret the local environment; seeing how all living things sense and respond t their environment

In order to get teachers started, a selection of learning tools to enhance these projects were highlighted: Flipgrid, BreakoutEDU, and Padlet.

I met with the classroom teachers involved in this project as a group to introduce and go over set-up of the tools in order for them to familiarize themselves, ask questions and get any support they needed. I created the following information sheets to provide as a summary:

Documents can be accessed with this link.

I was lucky enough to have had interest by teachers across several grades this year for the Global Read Aloud and so projects similar to this have also been generated for three other groups: a Mem Fox author study (gr. 1/2), Fenway and Hattie by Victoria Cox (gr. 2/3) and A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park (gr. 5/6).

Feedback has been positive so far! Students have been thoroughly engaged with the activities and have been actively using the apps. I am confident that as other teachers in the school see this project in action, they will want to jump aboard as well.

On a side note, I mentioned this endeavour at a district TL meeting and have since had the opportunity to work with a colleague at a neighbouring school to facilitate bringing some of these tools into her library/school as well.

Work cited

Serafini, F., & Youngs, S. (2013). Reading workshop 2.0: Children's literature in the digital age. The Reading Teacher, 66(5), 401-404.