O Canada!

Every year, my school in Albuquerque holds a "World Tour" event. Each class studies a country around the world and finds a way to present what they've learned so others can come visit their country on an evening in October. Our first grade class studied Canada - a country I have actually visited and had some, if little, knowledge of.

Being that it was my first year of teaching, I honestly had no idea how to get beginning first graders to do a research project during the first two months of school, when they were just barely learning to read. I did know that we would need reference materials so I went to multiple locations of the Albuqeruqe Public Library and checked out every children's book on Canada that I could find.

I decided to start with a KWL chart - K for what we already knew, W for what we wanted to know, and L is for recording what we did learn after doing our research. The kids came up with great suggestions for what we wanted to learn: what do Canadians look like, what do they wear and eat, what do their houses look like, what animals live there...and so on.

After we completed the chart, I distributed my basket of library books and just let the kids explore them. They were enamored. It was definitely one of those magical teaching moments when everything goes right and your kids are enthusiastic about learning and you know why you love your job. :-)

Prior to starting the unit I had also e-mailed as many of the Canadian provinces as I could find addresses for, explained our project, and asked if they might be able to send 30 copies each of their various tourism brochures. Many of them responded and we ended up with a fantastic collection, not only for use in our study, but for display at our culminating event. Some even sent posters that we were able to hang around the room.

Each day during our literacy block, we focused on a topic about Canada (food, clothes, housing, animals, etc.) and the kids would look through the books and tell me what they saw - I wrote the info on butcher paper to record what we'd learned. We later used the brochures from the tourist bureau to cut out pictures and glue them on the appropriate posters.

These are just a sampling of about 10-12 different posters we made. For some subjects, such as animals, major cities, famous Canadians, etc., there weren't pictures in the tourist brochures that we could cut out, so I used the lists we compiled while looking through library books and printed out pictures from the internet that the kids were able to glue on.

I brought in music by Canadian musicans to play while we worked (Raffi's C-A-N-A-D-A was our favorite, but we also heard music by Celine Dion, Shania Twain, Paul Anka, and others) and of course we couldn't skip the Canadian National Anthem!

I also found a tape recorded performance by Canadian figure skater Kurt Browning (of whom I am a fan!) when he won his 4th World Championship. He is an amazingly talented skater and the kids wanted to watch it over and over again. Many of them even came in during their recess time asking to watch it and bringing friends from other classes! For the rest of the year, we often had conversations about Kurt Browning when they would see him on TV, or choose to write letters to him during our letter-writing units, etc. I even had comments from parents at conferences about how much the kids loved him. It was really amusing!

Overall, I LOVED World Tour. It was overwhelming at first - just the thought of trying to fit it in with all the other things we had to do each day caused me some worry - but it turned out to be such a great experience for the kids and for me! I would jump at the chance to do it again!