Dot Day (Week) Part Two

We've continued our Dot Day celebration throughout the week!

Tuesday, Ms. Thompson's first graders connected with my friends Sarah Staudt & Ben Feight in Mason City, Iowa. Together we read the book The Day the Crayons Quit with our new friends. It was fun to get to meet other students across the state and share a story together!

Photo credit: Ben Feight

This is a picture from Mrs. Staudt's room as she's reading aloud to us. We are there in her computer screen! Check out Mr. Feight's blog to see what he had to say about the event!

Later, Mrs. Velvick's 4th graders met with Mrs. Staudt's class to create collaborative dots using Google Draw. We created 7 dots ahead of time, and students worked in groups of 5-6 to create dots between Cedar Rapids and Mason City! It was really cool to watch the students try to work collaboratively and see them start writing messages back and forth to each other finding out each other's names, what sports teams they liked, and other fun facts. The dots ended up a little messy, because we didn't give a lot of guidelines--we just wanted to see what the students could do!

Hopefully we will have the chance to do this again later in the year to learn collaboratively with friends in other places! 

Wednesday, Mrs. Collett's class Skyped with Ms. Nels' 3rd graders in southern Florida! We had a great time asking and answering questions about our cities. The weather in Florida is much different than Iowa, we found out! These students have been working on making Dot Day trading cards in Art class with Mr. Plagman. We will be sending these to our new friends in Florida, and they will be sending theirs to us! We shared a few of those during our Skype.

Ms. Schulte's kindergartener's got to Skype with an AK class in Green Bay, Wisconsin. We found out that most of them like the Green Bay Packers, and that several of us do too! Ms. Schulte's class shared the bookmarks that they'd been working on during art class. We will be sending those to our friends and we'll have a bookmark exchange!

Maxwell sharing his bookmark & getting thumbs up from our Wisconsin friends!

Mrs. Roelfs' second graders got to have fun with Mrs. Staudt, too! We made one big dot all together using Google Draw. Students in Cedar Rapids and Mason City took turns coming up and making their mark inside of our dot. 

Here's how our dot ended up!

We've had a fun week of connections, meeting new friends, and learning about life in different parts of the country! I can't wait until Dot Day 2015!