3-5th Orientation with GooseChaseEdu!

      I love how excited my students get when I add technology to my lessons, so I'm excited to share my 3rd-5th graders have been having a blast this week doing library orientation with the online scavenger hunt GooseChaseEdu.

      GooseChase was very easy to set up.  I signed up for a free educator account and then began creating what I wanted the students to do.  Each question is a "mission" in GooseChase, and the answer can be given by photo/video or typing in a text answer.

      I wanted my students moving around the library and I really wanted to force them to look at the signs and spine labels, so all of my missions have to do with sections and genres of the library.  Last year I rearranged my Fiction section by genre to make it easier for students to browse the type of book they like to read, but they are still getting used to the change and it had been all summer since they had been in the library.

     I ended up creating about 14 missions.  Most of them were just looking for a genre (Adventure, Historical, Scary, Animal fiction, etc) where they had to take a picture of the spines to show they found the right location.  The other few missions asked them to type an answer to a question such as "Who would you be interested in reading about?" in the biography section.

     Set up was super easy.  I downloaded the GooseChase app on my student iPads.  The free educator version let me use 5 iPads at a time, so when the students came in I put them into 5 groups before starting directions.  I brought up GooseChase on my Promethean board so I could show them an example of what evidence I wanted from them and that I could see (and delete!!) their answers as they submitted them.

     The students have really been enjoying it all week and I can really tell that they are using the signs to find things!  Success!!

     I am definitely not a GooseChase expert yet, but I am going to keep playing with it!  You can also link websites into your mission questions, so I'm thinking my next game may be a virtual reference scavenger hunt!  I am also looking forward to exploring the games other people have been creating to see what I can "borrow!"  My only wish for the moment is that there was a way to reset the game and delete (or archive) the submissions instead of having to click and delete each one to get ready for my next class - maybe that will come in future updates to the game.

Refugee by Alan Gratz

This book made my heart ache. 

I have been recommending it to all my fifth grade teachers as we have come back to school this year. It is an absolutely wrenching story of three 11-12 year old kids who are refugees at different points in time, but their stories still intertwine with each other.

The point of view rotates each chapter with a different child: Josef is escaping Nazi Germany with his family in the 1930's, Isabel is escaping Cuba with her family in the 1990's, and Mahmoud and his family are running from Syria in 2015.

It is a tough story to hear how hard life is for a refugee.  I was impressed how Mr. Gratz mangaged to share this story with only 2 curse words that I caught in the whole book.  It is sad, but there is joy in it.  There are characters who don't make it, but there is hope at the end.  And the end is more of a beginning because you realize this is someone's story right now.