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The Water Habitat Project What Students Had to Say One of the greatest challenges facing teachers today is building meaningful curricular learning experiences that not only develop students' essential learning skills but that also give them opportunities to see how what they learn can give them the tools to make their world a better place and thereby give them hope for today and tomorrow. If we say that "education makes a difference", then we need to provide learning experiences in which students can see that they can make a difference with what they learn in education. "One of the tasks of a progressive educator is to unveil opportunities for hope...providing hope to young people is the major challenge of teaching. Through engaging minds and imagination of children, teaching can help children develop the strength, pride, sensitivity they need to engage the world." (The Discipline of Hope: Learning from a Lifetime of Teaching. Herbert Kohl. Simon and Schuster. 1998) 
"What students have to say" while doing the Water Habitat Unit continually informs progress in how meaningful and generative telecommunications curricular projects are providing opportunities for students to learn and use their knowledge towards making positive differences in the world. The ongoing energized inquiry and metacognitive insights of the primary students as they are doing their pond observations, photo journals, and online e-mail and website collaborations also informs
the assessment of teaching and learning so far and the development of the next curricular steps.
Here are some comments from primary students about how their Water Habitat work makes a positive difference. What students have to say about collaborating with the City of Pullman on their Water Habitat work: 
"When we sent our water habitat observation e-mail messages about the island in our pond getting smaller because of muskrat burrows, ice, storms, and flooding, our friends at other schools around the world encouraged us to take action and to save the Sunnyside Pond island. They said we needed to get more people to care about the island and pond than just us. So, we invited Alan Davis from the city of Pullman to come and talk to our class about the island and pond. Alan is the person that takes care of the ponds in our city. He suggested we talk to the City of Pullman Parks and Recreation Committee about the problem with the island and ask them to help save it. We gave our report about the island and the pond to the city."
What students had to say when presenting their science data to the City to successfully fund restoring the island habitat as a nesting site:
"We hope our photo report helps you care about the pond and the island. We care about it a lot. We like the wildlife that is there because it is so interesting to watch. We hope that you will understand how important it is to save the island." 
"When you take action, people thank you for reminding them we all need to care. In a thank you note to our class the committee said: 'You all are doing a great job! Great research! Because of your presentation, the Sunnyside Island Project is a 1999 goal! Thank you for caring about the animals and the island. Your research and involvement will serve our community well for years to come!' "
"In our I*EARN Pond Water Habitat Project Cycle, we learned
together about water habitats. We helped each other take action
and to solve ecology problems. We found out that working together is better than working alone. When the pond island is restored, the ducks will have a better nesting habitat. We hope to see more ducks back at the pond using the island as a safe place for their ducklings. We want to keep doing more and keep caring because we feel happy about what we've done for the pond."Here's what students had to say after the island was restored: "The water is much better and the ducks are there again! We helped save the pond. It's really pretty if you keep it clean. Everyone needs to see how happy the ducks are." "Now we have healthy bugs like caddisflies, mayflies and stoneflies that tell us the water is better." What students have to say about using e-mail in the Water Habitat Unit: "E-mail is awesome because we get to send messages and get messages and send a response! It helps you learn a lot because you read new words and learn about new places." 
"When we send our e-mail to Uden, Netherlands, they learn about our pond water habitat. Then they look and learn about their water habitat. Then they write e-mail to us so we can learn about water habitats in the Netherlands. Their e-mail told us they have a small river called the AA. It is a very small stream. They also told us they have waterbirds in their lakes. And that they have a sea 80 miles away. We like reading e-mail!!! We read the e-mail on our computer first and then we print it out in reading booklets. We read the e-mail with our classroom reading partners."
"E-mail helps me make sense of my sentences. It makes me think about what I'm going to say. I like writing to people. E-mail helps me learn to read and write."
"I like e-mail because you can learn about how other people talk around the world and people can learn about us when they get our e-mail." A second grader, when given the opportunity to communicate with I*EARN teachers around the world whom she knew from doing the water habitat project, talked about how much she liked learning to read and write using e-mail in her water habitat work and said, "I think all the children all over the world should have what they need to read and write like we have." Then she added, "And thanks to all the teachers around the world for helping us learn to read and write! We couldn't have done it without you!" What students have to say about learning to read using their Pond Photo Journals: 
"The photo journals help me read because I like the pictures and the pictures help me remember the words like when there is that picture of 40 ducks and the words say 'It made us smile when we saw 40 ducks !!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!' I like that we put 40 exclamation marks for the 40 ducks!"
"The photo journals help me read because there are sometimes short words you see a lot and can remember like 'the, and, in, on, duck, pond, water, we, saw…' And I like the word 'island' because it has a silent letter s." 
"The photo journals help me read because if you know the first word and not the next word 'cause it's a hard word but you know the word after that…you can think about the pond and that helps you figure out the hard word in the middle!"
"I like reading about the pond because it's interesting. I like reading about the ducks and the water and the island." "When you type the words for the photo journal, you get to use homerow and you get to look at the picture to think about your ideas." 
"I like the digital images because the pictures are realistic and you can put them right into your writing right away. With other cameras, you have to develop the pictures first at the store and wait to get them. The digital image are easy to use because all you have to do is push a button to make the picture, take the disk out of the camera and put it in the computer. And you can brighten it and trim it to get just the picture you want and fix the size!"
"The photo journals remind you of good times and help you remember what you have to say when you are doing your pond writing. When we look at the older photo journals, you can see what the pond really looked like before so you don't have to just imagine it. And you can keep track of how the pond used to look and how much better or worse it used to be." 
What students have to say about using computers to write their e-mail about the pond:
"It helps to look at the digital image slide show when you are writing because you can remember better what we saw at the pond. " "In Puffin Prewrite, you just look at the images and type in some words so you remember your ideas for sentences and then you do a file/save as, name it Swan Draft and you can start writing your sentences under your prewrite words. In Egret Edit, you just underline your words that you think are sound spellings and then you conference with the teacher or look in a dictionary for the right spellings. You get a score to see how you did. Its fun to do the conferences because you get to know how well you did, you get to learn book spellings, and then the next time you write about the pond you try to remember the book spellings. In Owl Edit you just change your sound spellings to book spellings and you learn how to spell! In Wren Revise you get to move your words and sentences around using 'cut' and 'paste' so your sentences make more sense. In Peregrine Publish, you make paragraphs and you do your final edit and your writing's ready to fly fast on the computer to other places around the world!" "On the computer you get to edit to make your writing better so other people can read your ideas. Editing is fun because it's easy to do on the computer. It would be hard to write everything down by hand because your hands get all sweaty holding the pencil and you need lots of paper because you have to copy everything over and with a pencil you have to erase and sometimes the erasing doesn't work very well and the paper tears. When you have the computer, you can just delete and type again!" What students have to say about making and using their websites: "It's fun to think about what you want to write and it's fun to type the stuff you want to say. It's fun to trim the images. You get to use math to do the sizes with pixels." "I like using the different colors for the word and backgrounds. I like deciding which pictures to put in and I like making the letters big!" "I go to the library with my Dad and we can look at our pond websites there and I can practice my reading with him." " You can look at our websites at your house or at the library. You can show them to your family and friends. Lots of other people can look at our pond website and see what we are doing and learn stuff we are learning." Onto: |
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