From flat activities to super learning missions - Part 1

Hello everyone,

I am so happy to share with you, my new post! We have come so far and learned so much together. Now, I am going to show you how important it is to transform regular, plain and boring textbook activities into super learning missions! 

This is a very important topic, for this reason, I created two posts, in each one of them sharing with you one flat activity turned into a super learning mission. Of course, this is the first one. Moving on, as I already mentioned, it is very important to know as a teacher how to adapt an activity from a textbook and turn it into a challenging mission from which children will be able to learn, besides the content and English, values, how to cooperate and research, and share their knowledge with everyone else. 

For this purpose, and because there is so much to tell, I created two different Digital Magazines in which I will explain you in detail about the mission and the challenges included in it, and many other things that would've taken too much to explain on the blog.

Now, before going on with the magazine, I want to share with you a short presentation I created using Canva, which will help you remember and understand what a collaborative project needs to include. This is very important as our missions and challenges need to be part of the collaborative project and have to include those features and elements.

From flat activity to super learning mission by Re8eca M.

Bellow, you can read the Living and non-living things project - Part 1 magazine, which I created using Jilster an awesome application I recommend you to use! Moreover, it is important to mention that the magazine cannot be viewed over a phone, as it is not supported by such device. Please use the computer to read it. 

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In a brief summary, the flat activity I decided to turn into a mission, is a real textbook activity retrieved from the first of primary Natural Science book, in which children had to read the theory of how a plant is born and see pictures of its parts inside their textbook. Afterward, they would have to do some activities that will require them to fill in the gaps with the right name of the part of the plant and place some images about the life cycle of a plant in the right order. 

The mission is entitled The life cycle of a plant and it gathers three challenges. Each one of the challenges requires children to develop their autonomous and collaborative skills, as they will have to work both individually and in groups. Each one of the challenges in explained thoroughly, as they include instructions, objectives, competencies, temporization and digital artifacts.
As far as the digital artifacts are concerned, in the magazine, I only described the final product and I shared a few photos of what children might come up with. However, I could not do it in every case, as I can't start developing the posters that children may create when overcoming the challenges. The digital artifacts used during the missions are the following:

1. A BLOG for the class. I took a step forward and created a blog for an imaginary class, in order to make it more real. The blog is called Our Awesome First Class Blog, and you can visit it by clicking here. The blog has some pages opened, in which I tried to write and as if I were the entire class, but is not even close to what it would look like if the project would be really carried out.

2. A Twitter account. The imaginary class has also a twitter account and it is called @Awesome1Grade

3. Digital Magazine to share their work with the world. While I was working on the magazine, I realized that creating a magazine is an amazing way to spread all types of missions and achievements with the world. The best part is that it is not necessary to print it, but you can embed the link to your blog or download it and share it with everyone.

Another thing important to mention is that this mission is aligned with the 30 Goals Challenge project -- as you might remember, this is the collaborative project I want to collaborate and cooperate with --  because in order to develop this mission I had to come up with different goals that if accomplished it would change and improve the way I teach. Moreover, some of these goals are explained on page 15 in the magazine, so go on and read them.
Furthermore, there is one goal that I want to mention here, which is Teach using a comic. In order to overcome this goal, I created a digital comic using Pixton so my first graders would have to read it and learn more about the life cycle of a plant. Bellow, you can read it yourself and see if you like it. This can also be included within the digital artifacts used in the mission.

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Self-reflection

We can all agree about the importance of creating challenging activities and tasks that will require children to construct their own knowledge, whilst working together towards the same goals. All of us have to share with other teachers and children the enthusiasm of creating tasks that really matter and that can really make a change in the way children view learning. The teaching-learning process should be filled with inspiring moments in which children learn profound values while improving their skills, knowledge, and abilities in any area.

For this to happen, we are the guides that can make it possible, and everything it takes is a little bit of effort, passion, and creativity that will transform boring teaching into amazing teaching-learning missions for both students and teachers. While creating this post I realized the value of creating or even coming up with ideas for the development of projects that can ease and motivate children's learning. As I stressed in many of my previous posts, we cannot forget the magnitude of cooperating with each other, as this way, we'll be able to improve and upgrade our teaching skills. With this in mind, we have to try our best to not get hooked in the routine of opening up a textbook and start doing activities that have no meaning to our students. 

I learned so much while creating this post, and I hope you enjoyed and learned as well.

This is all for this entry, everyone. Thank you so much for reading and I will wait for you in the second part of this topic!

Don't forget to leave comments and feedback in order to improve this project!