Students Making Decisions for The Biome Project

My students are working on their biome projects now. Throughout this project they had to make choices based on what works best for them. Here are some vids of my students talking about what choices they made.

Here is Seth explaining what strategy he used to gather his information for the project.

Here Rosa talks about what strategy she used to gather her information for the project.

Here is Megan explaining what biomes she chose and which project she will do.

Here is Nathan explaining what biomes he chose and which project he will do.

Here is Parker explaining why he likes to be given choices with his work.

The Mystery of Saint Matthews Island

I've alluded to this story this year during our watching of the Digging for the Truth episode on Easter Island. This story is also about sustainability and how we need to learn from others examples.

We are going to use this story to launch The Biome Project 2009. This will be our extension for reading this week, but I expect it will take longer to complete than the usual extensions. Therefor, I am going to shorten this weeks assignment list so we have more time to finish. I expect we should be finished by next Tuesday including recording. We won't start doing anything on it until Thursday so we can focus on our story.

Here is the link to our Google doc instructions for this weeks reading.

Here is the link to the instructions for The Biome Project 2009.

Call for Participation: The Biome Project 2009

I would like to invite you to participate in this years' Biome Project. This project asks the students to use art to create visual representations of biomes and then give information orally about the biomes.

Students are given two options with their projects. The first choice is to create dioramas of three biomes. They then have to give a presentation about the biomes that is visually recorded. Here is an excellent example from last year of Macy's project.

The second choice is to represent the biomes using cut construction paper. The projects will be photographed and uploaded to Voicethread, where the students then narrated the pictures. Here is Keith's example from the project last year.

Here is the link to the Biome Project 2009 instructions. If you would like your class to participate, leave a comment with contact information, tweet me, or email me at wmchamberlain@gmail.com. Our last day of school is May 22, so if you would like to be involved please contact me soon.

Introducing The Biome Project

It is time to unveil our newest project The Biome Project. This project asks the students to use art to create visual representations of biomes and then give information orally about the biomes.

Students were given two options with their projects. The first choice was to create dioramas of three biomes. They then had to give a presentation about the biomes that was recorded by our webcam on Ustream. Here is an excellent example of Macy's project.


The second choice was to represent the biomes using cut construction paper. The projects were photographed and uploaded to Voicethread, where the students then narrated the pictures. Here is Keith's example from the project.

I am very proud of the students' effort with this project. We started this with two weeks of school left, and they worked very hard to get them completed.

We would all be very pleased if you left a comment for the students.

Biomes and Google Docs

Did you know that you could save your Google docs as a web page? I didn't either until I started preparing this lesson. It is very cool to be able to create my document, then save it as a web page that Google hosts. This makes my life much easier, and I am down with that.

Here is the link to the biomes assignment we talked about in class. Do your best work, your work will be documented on the internet for all to see.