BUDDY PROJECTS...

Collaborative projects between levels foster a sense of a larger learning community, allow kids to experience a greater variety of partnership roles and responsibilities and of course make more friends. It gives our kids the opportunity to begin to establish important relationships with the peers and teachers that they will work with as they move up and through their school years here.
This year we will have multiple inter-level partnerships.
Some will be for short-term projects— Next week we will begin a collaborative project with our high school photography class. The two classes will work together to create a book based on Tana Hoban’s “Look Again”. Students will be learning some basic elements of digital photography, observational skills, and basic photo editing publishing.


We will have yearlong partners in our Merlin buddies. This is a level 2 classroom led by Gretchen. This partnership is created to foster literacy skills. We do shared reading and writing activities and hope to be creating resources for a local pre school. We meet every other week. Last week the buddies worked together to create “sandwiches” that describe their interests and attitudes about reading. It was both fun and informative for buddies and teachers ☺

We will continue annual partnerships too. This will be our third year with Peace Buddies. This partnership between a level one class (Tree Swallows), a level two (Kestrels with Charlie) and a level three class (now Chris) began in the first week of school our first year. We created books with images of peace in recognition of International Day of Peace (September 21). Since then, we have gathered twice yearly around topics of peace and citizenship.
Our first project with Peace buddies is Pennies for Peace. You will be hearing more and more about this from your Tree Swallow. We have been learning about Dr. Greg Mortenson and the children of Korphe, a village in Pakistan. We have been exploring maps and comparing ways of life here and in the village Korphe. Last week we introduced the Pennies for Peace program, a worldwide fundraising program created by elementary students. This program provides the funding needed to build schools in Pakistan and Afganistan.
We will gather next week to begin planning and organizing. Over the next few weeks, the buddies will be creating and filming PSAs (public service announcements) providing information about Pennies for Peace to be shared with other classrooms. More news about this soon.