How It Started |
Learn more about how this project began in our classroom.
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Our Plan
Getting Started
This project began when I shared the idea of International Book Giving Day with my fourth grade learners. International Book Giving Day is a movement that is celebrated on February 14th each year. Its purpose is to help get books to as many children as possible and share the love of reading with others around the world. I introduced this idea to my classes and asked them what they might like to do to celebrate.
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Brainstorming Ideas
We began by brainstorming a list of possible ways to share books with other people. Most of the ideas that our readers suggested benefited kids in our community. Some of the ideas that were shared included holding a book drive at our school to collect gently used books, making a desk or shelf in the lobby for students to get books while waiting in the morning, writing and making books to give away to others, creating a Little Free Library at the school and in the community, donating books to our school's Panther Pantry program, or donating books to kids in hospitals.
VotingAfter completing some research on each idea and discussing the positives and concerns about each plan, the class voted on their top choices using a Google Form. We analyzed the data from our voting results and found that the preferred ideas included a book drive, two Little Free Libraries (one for our school and the other in the community), as well as donating books to people in need in our area. Students also voted to pursue multiple ideas rather than just one plan. We made a list of all the possible questions we would need to find the answers to in order to complete our project. The next step in our process was developing committees. We came up with four committees:
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Permission |
We talked about the responsibilities of each and learners were able to select the committee they wanted to focus on. Before we could do any more work with our project, we had to get approval from our school’s principal. Classes learned about how to write a persuasive letter that shared our opinion about why this should be a project we are allowed to do and worked together to create a letter for Mr. Youcheff. After reading our letter, Mr. Youcheff decided to come visit our classroom and talk about the project ideas. He had a chance to ask our class some questions and they did a fantastic job of answering them for him. We had brainstormed a list of questions we had for Mr. Youcheff in our Google Doc. Students took notes during his meeting with us to record his responses so we’d have the information for future reference. By the end of the meeting, we had gained his approval! He gave us final permission so we were ready to begin our project!
Let the Learning Begin!
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Special Note: Pay special attention to all of the non-fiction text features included on this page. Headings, captions, photographs, illustrations, links, colored text, graphs, and bullets were all intentional choices the students made to this page to help our audience read and understand our message more clearly.