Global Read Aloud
Presenter: Allison Burgeson, Alex Panos, Julie Meyers, & Liz Bryant
Last year, a colleague of mine tweeted me something called Global Read Aloud (GRA). As it was my first year teaching 5th grade since graduating college, I filed the idea away in the ‘to check out later’ compartment of my brain. As October approached, that same colleague decided to take a second look at this new site. One of the books was Fish in a Tree by Lynda Mullaly Hunt. We both thought, “Perfect, we have already read this book. We can totally do this.” Well turns out that’s not really how it works.
Part of what makes GRA work is reading the same book at the same time with hundreds of other classes throughout the entire world. This action creates possibilities of engagement and collaboration for students around the globe. Sure we could use some of the suggested ideas from other educators to talk about Fish in a Tree with our class, but we really needed to choose a new book to participate effectively in Global Read Aloud 2015.
We chose to read Fish by L.S. Matthews beginning in October. Fish is a story about one family’s refugee experience when they were living as volunteer workers in an impoverished and war torn, un-named country. Fish connected closely with current events last year as the Syrian Refugee Crisis and November terrorist attacks in Paris hit the media. Before we got too far, I knew students were going to need some help building their background knowledge on the subject of refugees.
I spent some time curating resources that would build my students’ schema. The Edmodo group for Fish was a tremendous help when I was looking for resources. I managed to borrow a Google Doc full of websites, videos, and news from another GRA teacher on Edmodo. I used it many times to find resources to help build my students’ background knowledge. We used many of these resources as a jumping off point for our classroom discussion which eventually led to student directed service learning project.
Once we chose a book we then had to make connections. Now every teacher out there is rolling their eyes at the word connections as they think of the shallow “this reminds me of…” statements that students so love to make at the most inopportune times during a read aloud. That is not the kind of connection Global Read Aloud is referring to here. Teachers make social media connections with other classes that have decided to read the same GRA book; which is important to the success of GRA. You can make connections in a variety of ways, but you find these connections through the GRA Edmodo groups, the #GRA2016 on Twitter, or the Facebook group for GRA2016. Each book, chosen for this year, also has a hashtag on Twitter you can use to connect to other classes: #GRALauren, #GRABFG, #GRAPax, #GRAOJ, #GRAAll.
Once you have made a connection with another class, you have to decide how to collaborate with them as your read your chosen book. There are many options for collaboration during GRA. For my first time out last year, I decided to start with an Edmodo group shared with another class. I also tweeted some updates with the correct hashtag for our book. As I got braver, I began to look for classes to Skype. You can find classes to Skype, Google Hangout, or Facetime with through social media platforms (Twitter, Edmodo, etc.).
I found that my students gained the most from participating in Skype conversations with other classes. It allowed them to see and talk with other students directly. They also had to plan the questions and comments because their time was limited, and they had to take turns. They gained a lot from collaborating with students in Argentina. They shared similar opinions about the book and had many questions about their culture in general. They also had a very meaningful conversation with a group of students in Chicago when they were planning a service project to aid refugees. Probably the most significant conversation we had was with the author L.S. Matthews via Google Hangouts. The students were able to get their questions answered directly by the author, and sometimes they were disappointed and had a hard time processing the new information. For example, one character that my students thought was a representation of God turned out to be just a someone the author based on a news report she saw before writing the book.
By the end of GRA2015, my students were having self-directed conversations about current events with their friends and family to add to the discussions during class time. They had also managed to research various charitable organizations that benefit refugees to decide which they would want to support. They were then able to plan and publicize their change collection to collect funds to donate to their charity of choice.