Colorful Spring!
 A Collaborative Internet Literacy Project   Spring 2007

Debra Rastin and the Grade 1-2 Class
Trafalgar P.S.
London, Ontario
 Canada

     Our class read many Spring poems and stories.  One of our favourite stories was Naomi Knows It’s Springtime by Virginia L. Kroll.  We read the story every day.  We started with a visualization exercise, and then we got to see the pictures.  We brainstormed the many interesting words in the poem - words like nestlings, custard, screech.   We did word sorts and word puzzles.  We wrote about spring.

     Where we live, spring starts with melting snow which is dirty from the winter, add gray skies and rain, and, finally, a burst of colour and warmth.   Our class spring poem looks like this:

Some of the standards that were taught throughout the unit were:

Students:
•    asked questions, participated in group discussions, used personal experiences to generate ideas for writing.
•    established relationships, activated prior knowledge and made connections before listening activities, retold stories , asked questions to solve problems, shared ideas and information.
•    expressed themselves by using prior knowledge, understanding word order, asking questions, visualizing, retelling important information, drawing pictures
•    identified other texts with similar content and style by making personal connections between his/her own ideas about a topic and the ideas expressed in a text
•    identified how elements such as voice and word choice make mind pictures to help the reader understand the text.
•    read non-fiction texts, noting  the non-fiction attributes each had e.g. table of contents, glossary, index, pictures, diagrams, graphs, photographs, captions etc.
•    were able to access programs assigned in the "Hand Out" folder of the schoolwide computer network. This allowed the practice of SMARTboard activities introduced in the classroom within the lab. On the SMARTboard, itself, students practise  moving icons and words easily, and know how to solve simple problems encountered when using it.