Community Circles Are Up!

Students have finally completed the community circles we have been working on for the past few weeks! We have circles that describe our home community, school communities, Lewiston, Maine, United States and earth communities. Each of the communities has a drawing on the front describing it and a written description on the back. What and how much was written depends on what community the students were describing. 

Home and school communities were easy because students are there all the time and know lots about them. The circles were also relatively small so students didn't have to write as much. When working on our Lewiston circle, students did research independently or with a partner on Spruce pod laptops. We also had a classmate whose parents own a business in downtown Lewiston that we wrote about. At the end of our research, the class combined all of our new found information on an anchor chart that we hung in the room. We researched Maine using books from the school library- desk partners took five minutes to search through a book before passing it to the next set of desk partners and looking through a new book. We read a big book about the United States and looked through the social studies text book website http://sf.factmonster.com/atlas/unitedstates.html, taking notes together;and last, we watched a video about earth on Brain Pop Jr.'s website twice and took notes about what we learned.