AKGTC + Breakout: Step 2: Brainstorm Community Locations

This post is part of a series that describes the learning journey of combining two great projects that focus on the hamlet of Acadia Valley, AB and the grade 4-5-6 combined class at Warren Peers School. The two intertwining projects will be 1) putting this community on the A Kids Guide to Canada Map AND 2) using our community information to build digital breakout tasks (with BreakoutEDU.com) that we will later share with parents, the school and the community. Follow the whole journey here.

If you are unfamiliar with The “A Kid’s Guide to Canada” project, basically schools and communities across the country can help other kids get to know their community by putting it “on the map” of Canada at the AKGTC website. The motto sums it up nicely: “A Kid’s Guide to Canada – By Kids, For Kids”.

Step 2: Choose Locations on the Map

So for Step 2 of our project, we focused on the “map” side of things. We spent some time clicking on other communities in various regions of Canada to get a feel for what other kids had put on the map for their communities. We had a great impromptu discussion when we clicked on a multi-storey school in the Toronto area and a picture in an upper-storey window showed buildings as far as the eye could see. Check out the picture below for a comparison of what students see out their schools window and you can see how a discussion could arise!

We used a chart in a Google Doc projected on the white board to come up with a list of enough community locations so that as the project progresses, each student can specialize in one location. It is so interesting to listen to a child’s view of the “significant places” in a community!

Click here to check out other steps in this project.