Saturday, November 7, 2009

Newspapers and "How To" Projects

At Holy Cross we have been busy trying to create projects that incorporate different aspects of the XO. Two weeks ago we did a "How To" Project. We broke the kids into groups and they had to choose something that they wanted to teach the rest of the group how to do. All that we told them was that they would pick a topic, tell us how to do it (including the steps, ingredients needed (if any), the rules (if any), etc), that they needed to type the directions in write and that they had to include at least 3 pictures with their project. We had 4 teams, and the topics were "How to play Soccer", "How to play Rugby", "How to make Tea" and "How to make Coffee." The projects ended up taking two days to complete because everyone wanted to include many pictures and we had to take time for each group to present to the rest. It was very sucessful. The Rugby group worked using two computers, one person was typing while the other looked up information about Rugby on the wiki (we did not even hint that they should do this, it is so nice to see them using different aspects of the XO all on their own). Since the how to make tea/coffee projects were a bit easier to explain, we actually tried to do them step by step to see if it worked (this was a fun way to show that the steps were not complete enough or that a step was out of order).

The next week we made a newspaper. For the first half of the session we talked about different aspects of a newspaper and what each section in a paper is responsible for. Then the kids decided on a name for the newspaper (After School Program News) and each student picked a section (we had weather, sports, news events, opinion, poems, and adverts) and then had to write the section and incorporate a photo. In this group of students we have different age groups, so the younger ones did the weather, opinion and sports section and the older ones covered news, poems and adverts. Two students even put a caption under their photo to explain how it related to the article. They were very excited about this project and even showed their teachers the next week because they were so proud of it!

No comments:

Post a Comment