WARNING: Capturing video while teaching can cause motion sickness to the view. Dramamine may be necessary while watching. :-)
I had the awesome opportunity to work with a classmate to engage kids in a new way. Ms Jane and I set up our classrooms and taught our kids a high frequency word game. We facetimed in. Each class would ask a question about a word wall and we would whittle down our high frequency word list until we only had one left. The children could only ask yes/no questions and if the answer to the question was no, the other team got a turn.
My children absolutely LOVED getting to see another class of kindergartners that they'd never met face to face. Many of them were surprised to hear that the other class is learning exactly the same thing as they are. It is always fun to see kids who are normally only somewhat engaged get excited and fully invest in our activity.
This activity helped kids to think a bit more deeply about their words. They can already recognize them and write them but this helped them to see similarities and differences between words. Finding all of our words with an "a" in it or all of the words with 3 letters just further helps them to learn the words. Learning this while playing a game with a class across town? Jackpot! Later on in the day I was telling my team how it had gone and my teammate asked to play a round with us. So, later in the afternoon we played a round with my teammate. The only problem is that we didn't exactly get the technology to work properly. Moral of the story: Make sure you test the technology first! Ms Jane and I had tested it before children had gotten to school that morning. We had a couple of small kinks to work out and by the time kids got there our settings were all correct and were ready to go. Since we didn't do that in the afternoon we wasted some valuable teaching time. LESSON LEARNED!
