Part 4: "What Can You See?" and Mexico!

As part of our "What Can You See?" project, we have been pushing our thinking by making deeper connections with the other participating schools! It's truly incredible to watch our students use this authentic audience to spark their own inquiries about the world around them! In this context, we have used our ongoing comparison charts to support our questions, discoveries, and wonderings. In particular, our class decided to post a comment on Ms. Babalis' blog to compliment her class on their "We Can See" book! This comment has now led to us communicating with Ms. Babalis' class virtually and as a result, has elicited remarkable comments from both classes! Ms. Babalis' class and her "We Can See" team, kindly wrote us a personal reply to our comment whereby they used great detail to explain their connections to our book, questions they had for us, and other wonderings about our school and the learning that occurs in our classroom! Check out the letter to our class by clicking here. We are currently working on drawing pictures and writing words back to Ms. Babalis' class and are continuing to piece together our letter that we will send back to them! Stay tuned!

To top it off, yesterday we had another exciting chapter unfold as part of our "What Can You See?" project! After watching Ms. Gomez' class' "What Can You See?" book from Monterrey, Mexico last week, we arranged a Skype session to help support our learning about them and their community! Just like when we skyped with Mrs. Harrison's class, our students came up with three questions that they wanted Ms. Gomez' class to answer so that we could gain a deeper understanding of their school and where they live! Here is what we came up with:

1. What kinds of toys do you play with outside?
2. Do you have snow in winter?
3. Why do you have a guard?

After lunch, our students came in from recess very excited and eager to meet and speak to our new friends from another country! Our selected speakers grabbed their interview clipboards and all waited very patiently as we waited for "the call!"

Here is what we learned from Ms. Gomez' class and their schoolyard:

1. We have a house to play, slides and swings.
2. No, we don't have snow in winter because it's warm here in Monterrey. It's cold but not that cold to snow.
3. The policeman is our guard because he can stop anybody who is bad from coming in. He stays at the front door of our school.

Here are the questions that Ms. Gomez' class asked us about our class and schoolyard:

1. How many "patios" (playgrounds) do you have?
2. How many teachers do you have?
3. How many students do you have in your class?

We truly enjoyed teaching our new friends about our class and community! Furthermore, it was so inspiring to watch our students generate new questions as they watched and listened to our new friends! Below are some of the questions that came up throughout our session which helped make for a lively discussion!

1. Why do you have all the same shirts on? - J.S. (SK)
"Because we have gym class and those are our uniforms!" - Ms. Gomez' class

2. Do you have a parking lot? - R.L. (SK)
"Yes, and we have lots of cars!" - Ms. Gomez' class

3. What language do you speak? - R.F. (SK)
"SPANISH!" - Ms. Gomez' class

Ms. Gomez' class also wanted to know: "Do you have Christmas at your school?" to which we replied "Yes!" as well as a whole bunch of other holiday traditions!

To conclude our Skype session, we asked Ms. Gomez' class if they could teach us some words in Spanish and in particular, how to say "hello" and "goodbye." This was such a wonderful interaction to witness between our two classes! "Ola" and "Adios" filled our room as we celebrated our new learning!

One of our students even had the idea of sending Ms. Gomez' class the video from our "Shape Rap" performance! We are very excited to have the opportunity to share our learning about 3D shapes with our new friends in Mexico and we hope they will have some connections that they can share with us! We welcome and encourage them to comment on this blog post once they watch our video so we can share them with our class!

Stay tuned as we continue to share our connections, new learning, and discoveries from throughout our "What Can You See?" journey! It just keeps getting better and we can't wait to see where it'll take us next!