Tag Archives: AKGTC

AKGTC + Breakout: Step 8 – Community Interviews

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.

As we are turning this “Kids Guide to Canada” on the map project into something DEEP, a super engaging step has been to assign student experts to different buildings or landmarks (read more here.) Step 6 mentioned student interviews with local experts who were connected to the various locations.

If you can make a step like this happen, it will provide an incredible richness to your project! Our original plan was to record the phone conversations with students and community experts, but not all participants were comfortable with recording, so instead, an adult helper or Education Assistant scribed notes as the students asked their interview questions on speaker phones. These interviews resulted in a rich list of “I had no idea…!” from the adult helpers.

In the short term, students will add the interview information into the class “Community Expert” Google Slides using a template. Each student will have 2 or 3 slides – they get to choose a solid background colour for their location and add a photo to each slide from our class album; they will then add a revised and edited paragraph summary that they have created in English Language Arts class. The interviews are so exciting that we are even dreaming of creating a “Town History” website on Google Sites which could feature the history of so many locations!

Using all parts of work thus far

Grade 1-2-3 students use photos taken earlier in the project to produce artwork
  • The background information and facts that students gained from the interviews was very useful during the creation of our Community Breakout Game. Our Community Expert Slide deck was accessed by classmates as they worked on clue creation.
  • Our photos have been used in our Community Expert Slide deck and in the Breakout Game
  • Photos were also printed and used as models for the grade 1-3 class as they each drew a community location. (see image)
  • Students used photos to create “Congratulations” signs for the Breakout Game

AKGTC + Breakout: Step 6 – Student Experts

Our next step is to have students pick a location in the community (one that we previously took pictures of) and become an “expert”. Here’s what this will involve:

  • The class brainstorms a list of questions that would help someone learn more about the history of a location in their community.
  • The students will conduct a COVID-friendly phone interview with the current owner of a location (or someone who is knowledgeable about the location if it is a public site).
    • the teacher has set up the contacts ahead of time and an EA or other helper will record the call on an iPad so that the student has record of the answers to use later for their research
  • Each student will add a summary of their “expert interviews” into a class slide-deck;
    • we’ve started with each student filling in a template slide after selecting a unique background colour; inserting a photo from our shared photopalooza collection folder; adding the name of the company or location; and finally adding their own name to the slide with word art
    • after the interview is conducted, students will add their research highlights to an additional slide or two in their background colour – each “colour” will be a different location topic
  • When most slides/locations are complete, the slide deck will be added to the class Padlet which is linked to the A Kids Guide to Canada site. Padlet has been a clever tool because we added the link when we created our initial “location” on the map, and then we can continually add items without having to request changes from the website hosts.

Some of the places that students will become “experts” about:

Grade 4-5-6 Photo Expedition

Click here to read about the rest of the steps in our Kid’s Guide to Canada Map + Breakout EDU Community project.

AKGTC + Breakout: Step 5-Get on the Map!

Finally – the step that we’ve all been waiting for! Let’s get that map dot on the Kids Guide to Canada map!

If this is your first time adding to the Kids Guide to Canada Map, you will want to go over the steps before hand, and not necessarily launch into this step with students. There is a fairly detailed form that you fill out and you should be ready to add any of the following when you create your item:

  • photos (preferably with a good descriptive title – you know, other than IMG641.jpg); whatever your photos are “saved as” will show up on the list on your map entry, so I think it is well worth your time to provide a good image title
  • any other link to content such as a YouTube video (could be set to public or unlisted); there is only space for a single link, so…..
  • I love the idea of an “expandable link” – a place where the link stays the same but you can add and edit content as needed. See the image where it says “link to artifact”. This is important because YOU can’t edit your entry – if you need anything changed or added, you need to contact the nice ladies at A Kids Guide to Canada. They WILL amend your entry, but I would like to keep their workload down! These are some “expandable link” options that you might try the following:
    • Padlet.com – Here is a link to our ‘protected’ Padlet site that we will be using for AKGTC
    • a Wakelet.com collection
    • a Google Site, or any other website
    • a class blog, such as the blog that can be connected to your Seesaw class
  • Content ideas to add at an “expandable link” are almost limitless! This expandable link is what allows this to be an ongoing project where you could add things like:
    • video tours
    • interviews
    • research slideshows
    • community or Canada insprired artwork

Although it isn’t super convenient to make edits to your original “post” you can add additional “pages” to your location. They recommend a new page if you are adding content from a different class or grade (this is what we have done in Acadia Valley), or if you have content on an entirely different theme, such as economics or music or “place”.

Click on the dots to the north and south of Acadia Valley to see other school communities from our PRSD8 school district.

Click here to read about the rest of the steps in our Kid’s Guide to Canada Map + Breakout EDU Community project.

AKGTC + Breakout: Step 4: Photo-palooza!

There are few things more enjoyable than to stroll around small-town Canada on a 23 C November day! We had the perfect day for our our “photo shoot” – which makes for energetic students and relaxed teachers! Good thing, as this day will be one of the most memorable days of the project and the year for these students.

Tip #1: When we take the photos, we like to have the students visible, but without faces showing. This allows the students to identify themselves, yet it provides enough anonymity that privacy is not a concern. After a photo or two, students quickly catch on and can easily get “into position”.

Grade 4-5-6 Photo Expedition

Toward the end of the journey, we did have to implement the rule that if you were too far behind, you missed the photo! As most students do not want to be left out of being famous, this usually caused them to keep up with the pack.

This day certainly feels very different than when I have done similar photo excursions in more populated locations. We don’t count kids. We often have to remind the kids (and adults) that we probably shouldn’t walk down the middle of the street. When the community dog starts following along, most of the kids don’t even stop of acknowledge it.

Tip #2: Be sure to take the opportunity to talk out loud about some basic photo techniques:

  • high angle, low angle, eye level shots – advantages of each
  • background and foreground
  • “staging” a photo (there might be a time or two that this is necessary
  • lighting – how does the placement of the sun affect a photo
  • size and scale – having students stand in certain places to emphasize the size of an object

Talk to the students about the effect that you are trying to achieve. For example, “I need you to all turn a quarter turn toward the store so that I can get the sign at a better angle.”

Of course, if your students are older, enlist some of them to be the photographers. (Check out the town of Redcliff, AB on the Kids Guide to Canada Map – this was an entire student photography class project.)

Tip #3: Use your phone camera – it takes great pictures. To make things as quick as possible for the next step (labelling or captioning the photos), take your photos right into your cloud storage – they will upload and be ready to use immensely faster. As a bonus, if you have more than one person taking photos, be sure to share the folder, this way everyone’s photos end up in the same place and you don’t have to wait for people to try and send them. To do this;

  1. open up your cloud storage app on your phone (Google Drive, One Drive, Drop Box, Google Photos)
  2. navigate to the folder where you want to save the images
  3. (if you have multiple photographers, make sure this folder is saved with each of them)
  4. hit the “+” then “use camera”

Tip #4: Take photos with Breakout EDU clues in mind (if you are like us and doing a combined project). Here are some ideas to consider:

  • Colour: take photos of groupings of objects that are multi-coloured like playground equipment; or, take individual photos of different coloured items that would fit into a similar category, such as vehicles, flowers, or in our case, antique machinery
  • Numbers: address numbers on houses and businesses are the obvious choice here, but consider street signs, or advertising signs that might include numbers such as dates, etc; be sure that you take a closer-up version of the location with the number prominently visible and obvious
  • Logos: take photos of identifiable brands like Tim Hortons, McDonalds, etc.; although non of those signs were available in Acadia Valley we did find Pepsi
  • Identifiable Shapes: obviously a square and rectangle are easy finds but look for triangles (a roof line, playground equipment, street signs), circles and stars which are often used as shapes in Breakout Clues

Tip #5: When you get back to class or for another day…. The students LOVE to come back to class and see the photos. As you review them with your class, have the students help you create catchy labels or captions. Come up with some criteria of a good caption (eg. short as possible, necessary info, allows for differentiation between photos). This part is important for a few reasons:

  • if you have students later use the photos from a “shared folder” they can easily find what they need
  • when you upload photos to the A Kids Guide to Canada Map, this caption is what your audience will see; visitors are more likely to click on “Sunset Playground” than “IMG7042.jpg”!
  • labelling photos are creating captions is a real-life skill that is especially necessary if students work on digital platforms

Click here to read about the rest of the steps in our Kid’s Guide to Canada Map + Breakout EDU Community project.

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.

AKGTC + Breakout: Step 1: Review Breakout with a Physical Game

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.

Last school year, this grade 4-5-6 split class had done lots of work getting to know the ins and outs of creating breakouts – but we needed a little refresher after a long COVID break to get our “creator minds” in gear.

Principal/teacher Mrs. Fletcher Wilson gets in on the Breakout action

Step 1: Physical Breakout Review

Our kickoff to this combined project of Breakout building and Community discovery with the A Kids Guide to Canada MAP project was to participate in a physical Breakout game. So with masks and other COVID protocols in place for working as a group on a physical breakout, students are strategically placed in groups of 2 and are challenged to Break Out!

The Power of Yet

This breakout was a challenging, content-specific one about Parts of Speech. As I facilitate Breakout sessions with students across our district, it sure is interesting to see how students respond the first time or two in the area of grit or perseverance. So often, the students’ instinct is to give up the first time they try a lock and it doesn’t open. Many students don’t even know how to try something different, tweak their approach, or to “think outside of the box”. Thus, a big goal that I have for classes that play Breakout is to develop a “not-yet”, perseverance-driven growth mindset.

Next up: Step 2

Read about the rest of the “Ultimate Community Project” here.

The Ultimate Class Project: Kids Guide to Canada + Digital BreakoutEDU

In our mostly rural school district over the past 3 years, we have helped teachers in a few different communities put their schools and communities On the Map as a project connected to A Kid’s Guide to Canada. On the map above you can see our Alberta community dots for Burdett, Redcliff, Schuler and New Brigden located inside the red box. Click this link to get to the interactive map and click on these dots found in Southern Alberta. When you click on the community, scroll down to see images and links.

Last spring we were planning to add Warren Peers School, located in Acadia Valley, AB to the A Kid’s Guide to Canada map, but then COVID hit. In addition, COVID interrupted a student digital Breakout Building project that we were working on in the triple-graded 4-5-6 class at Warren Peers. This fall, as we started to resurrect our Digital Breakout Class project, the idea to merge the Digital Breakout creation with putting Acadia Valley on the A Kid’s Guide to Canada map started to click into place.

Acadia Valley is located about 1.5 hours north of our district office, so when we travel to the community to work on a project we usually carve out several different time slots during the day to make the drive worthwhile!

This will be the launch page to read about the steps in this process and our progress. Links will be added as our project progresses. We invite you to follow along in this multi-disciplinary, multi-class, deeper-learning project.