Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Vampire Bat Inquiry Investigation & Coalescence

Vampire Bat Inquiry Investigation & Coalescence


Vampire Bat Inquiry Investigation & Coalescence from Ben Kovacs on Vimeo.
After reading the LA Times article, "Vampire Bats: To Kill or Not to Kill", students were curious to know more. We wrote down a collection of burning questions and embarked on research to find more. Here is some video of the process of investigating those answers and coalescing the information. (The silence may be an indicator of how into it the kids are!)
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Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Bat Voicethreads!

720p from Autumn Laidler on Vimeo.

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Bat Voicethreads

Hi #BurNTA, The fourth graders were hard at work last week researching to find answers to our big bat questions: How are bats with big ears different than bats with small ears? How can bats eat 1000 insects in one night? How do bats benefit or help an ecosystem? Why do bats live in communities? A student created question..... We did some investigating and created voicethreads to share our work.....unfortunately the internet at our school is not top notch and the longer, more commented voicethreads didn't load to our voicethread page, only the pictures. Our teacher Ms. Laidler did a work around by filming the voicethreads from some of the ipads in our classroom. You can watch those below. http://voicethread.com/share/3742516/
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Friday, November 16, 2012

6th Graders Join In....

We are Burley sixth graders in room 208. Mr. Kovacs is our teacher and he is always telling us how smart we are... which is only because we go to such a rockin school. We have already been impressed with how big your science lab is (NTA) and have asked if we can go on a field trip... he's still deciding if/how to make that happen.

We are very big readers. One person is even reading War and Peace... or at least attempting to. We'll see if he's successful. We like art too! We like lots of things (including sushi). We like music, technology, algebra, and well I guess we like everything. 


Here we are learning from Ms. Ziemke's first graders and Ms. Laidler's science students. One initial reaction:


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Friday, November 9, 2012

4th graders start to investigate!

We started learning from our 1st grade partners from what they shared about their bat knowledge. We found out they eat insects which is a very important part of our ecosystem. We have been learning about living and non-living things and how they interact in the environment. We found out that bats are very important to the ecosystems they live in. After watching the first grade videos we back channeled both the things we learned from the first graders and the questions we wanted to investigate ourselves. You can see those below. After we came up with some things we wanted to learn about we watched a very cool TED talk about bats. Emma Teeling is a zoologist who shared some very informative facts and pictures of bats. Here is some of what we learned today!

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Hello #BurNTA!

We are a group of 3rd and 4th graders from National Teachers Academy. We will be sharing our science learning with you as our projects continue. Check out the map below to see where our school is located on the south side of Chicago and where Burley is in the city. We are so excited to learn with you and share our learning!
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Sunday, November 4, 2012

First grade investigates bats!

In first grade:

 This week we began a mini-inquiry into bats.  First, we wondered about bats and generated a list of questions.  Then we researched online by studying images and watching short video clips.  Next, we read Bat Loves the Night by Nicola Davies and National Geographic Young Explorer Bats!  
While researching we monitored our comprehension and practiced reading with a question in mind.  We documented our new learning and noted when we found the answers to our questions by posting sticky notes in text.  We also used the SonicPics app to draw and write our annotations of the text during an interactive read aloud.
We synthesized our new learning by creating podcasts about bats and plan to share these podcasts with our 6th grade colleagues at Burley and also with 4th and 5th grade science students at National Teachers Academy. We hope to make this bat investigation a cross-grade, cross-school, collaborative learning experience.  
Here are some samples of students using SonicPics to synthesize their learning about bats:



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Thursday, November 1, 2012

Hello #BurNTA friends!  This is Room 106 reporting from Burley School!  We are 33 first graders who are curious, kind and love to learn.  This year we are exploring technology through our 1:1 iPad program and are excited to collaborate with the #BurNTA team to share our learning. You can find out more about our first grade class by visiting our website.




This fall we became curious about bats.  Over the past few days we've been building our background knowledge to learn more.  After reading the article Bats! from National Geographic Young Explorer we had many questions about bats.  Here are a few of our questions:


Are you a bat expert? Do you have information that would help us learn more?  Please share your information with us by responding to this blog or via Twitter.
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