I think it was two years ago when I first officially joined the Global Read Aloud. We were reading The Year of Billy Miller that year and I was teaching 2nd grade. I was invited by my Tweep Tam in Australia and was excited to collaborate worldwide with other kids and teachers reading the same text. Then last year, as I returned to 1st grade, I brought Ms. Turken along for the ride and had an even more amazing journey exploring and responding to Lauren Castillo books!
As we moved into this fall, excitement was high to join this project again, and THE DAY IS FINALLY HERE! We are so jazzed to be studying Mem Fox (and old, familiar favorite author!) and sharing our learning along the way. We will for sure use Seesaw to show our friends and family our thinking, but also hope to collaborate with other kids via Skype, too.
We started with a short video about Mem Fox, and some wondering about both her life and Australia, where she lives. Then, I shared a book I had written when I was teaching 2nd grade (as a mentor text during a culture study we were doing in Social Studies). It was a little indulgent–I got to have a Peter Reynolds moment and say “Australian Culture, by ME!”–but also helped give kids some background on Australia before we read.
Australian Culture Book
Kiddos wrote and drew about what they learned and uploaded their thinking to their Seesaw journals.
Today we came back, ready to hear Koala Lou (the first week’s book), but instead we first teased kiddos with a habit that we’ve learned that good readers do–take a sneak peek. We studied the front and back covers and kiddos made predictions about what they thought the story might be about. They did a pretty good job of guessing some things that actually happened in the story. Again, these were uploaded into Seesaw so we could share our learning.
