February 26, 2019 by plemmonsa

The Winner of the 2019 Barrow Peace Prize Is…

Our 2nd graders gathered in the library for the 6th annual announcement of the Barrow Peace Prize. During this special ceremony, we connect with the team at Flipgrid. Each year, the Flipgrid team grows, and this year we connected with them at their headquarters in Minnesota and also in other locations where team members were working. The kids loved seeing their many faces on the screen celebrating their work.

Before our Skype, I showed students a map of places their voices were heard around the world. They were amazed by the pins in over 110 different locations and counting.

During our ceremony, we started with some introductions and greetings from the Flipgrid team. Then, we took time to hear some special stories from the project. Every year, we get comments on social media about the project which I share with the students. They love having a personal connection with people who have heard their voices.

This year, I had a message exchange with an individual from Canada. She messaged me through our library Facebook page, so I shared her message with the students.

Marion Hodges from Canada says: “greetings from Canada. For the kids who chose Jackie Robinson they might be interested to know that he started his pro career in Montreal with the Montreal Royals. He endured a lot of the same treatment but also a lot of respect. After that he went on to play with the Dodgers. For the kids who chose Rosa Parks – there is a lady named Viola Desmond who did something very similar in Nova Scotia in the 1940s as she refused to leave the “white-only” section of the cinema. She was a successful beautician and entrepreneur and you can see her picture on the Canadian 10 dollar bill.”

Next, we launched into awards. Each teacher selected 3 students to receive one of three awards:

Prolific Persuader: For using your persuasive techniques to encourage an authentic audience to vote for your civil rights leader.
Outstanding Openers: For using a creative hook to capture your audience’s attention from the very beginning of your persuasive writing.
Dynamic Designers: For creating an inspiring piece of art to accompany your persuasive writing and visually engage your audience.

Christine, Marty, and Sindy from Flipgrid announced these student winners. This is one of my favorite parts of the ceremony because the kids erupt in applause for their classmates as they walk up to receive the award. The Flipgrid team applauded each group of students and we took a quick picture with the screen.

Another tradition we have thanks to a former Barrow student is having students design the Barrow Peace Prize. This year, students applied to design the peace prize by submitting sketches or ideas for what it might look like. Six students were chosen. We met together in the library and found ways to combine our ideas into one prize. The design was created in Tinkercad and printed on our Makerbot 3D printer. Each of the designers received a medal. Every student who researched the winner of the 2019 Barrow Peace Prize also received a medal. Finally, each classroom received a medal for students to take turns wearing. Even though we have one winner of the prize, this is a project that we are all contributors to.

Finally came the moment kids have been waiting to hear. The Flipgrid team announced the winner of the 2019 Barrow Peace Prize.

And the winner of the 2019 Barrow Peace Prize is…….Jackie Robinson! #FlipgridFever #studentvoice #tlchat #futurereadylibs @Flipgrid @CapstonePub pic.twitter.com/fERS2Ig5Ro

— Andy Plemmons (@plemmonsa) February 26, 2019

Jackie Robinson received the 2019 Barrow Peace Prize. Kids once again erupted with cheers and applause.

All of the researchers of Jackie Robinson came up to received their medals and take a picture. As soon as students left, I updated our Smore page.

Once again, I was reminded of how special this project is. There are so many ways for students to get engaged with the content whether their strength is art, writing, reading, speaking, designing, or something in between. I love that it gets our student voices out into the world in a positive way and shows our students how far their voices can travel.

Well done, scholars! 🎉 Way to go! Your hard work is inspiring! 🤩💚✨ It’s an honor to celebrate #BHM and the Barrow Peace Prize Awards with you all! ☮️🙌🏼 #FlipgridFever #studentvoice

— Ann Kozma (@annkozma723) February 26, 2019

Thank you to all of our students and teachers for their hard work on this project. Thank you to all who voted. Thank you Capstone for getting us kicked off each year in our research with PebbleGo. Thank you Flipgrid for amplifying our student voice with your product and celebrating our work each year. We look forward to next year.

April 28, 2014 by plemmonsa

Exploring Civil Rights through Blackout and Magnetic Poetry

5^th grade has a massive social studies curriculum. It spans from the civil war all the way up to the present. One of the things that they have been doing for the past 2 years that I love is using Christopher Paul Curtis’s books to tie in to the curriculum. They start with Elijah of Buxton, move to Bud Not Buddy, and finish with the Watsons Go to Birmingham 1963.

The civil rights movement is where they have been spending a lot of time recently, so the teacher emailed me to see what we might do in the library to focus on this time period in her language arts class. The standards they are working on are:

SS5H8 The student will describe the importance of key people, events, and developments between 1950-1975.

b. Explain the key events and people of the Civil Rights movement; include Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on Washington, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and civil rights activities of Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Since it’s poetry month, I wanted to pull poetry into our time together, and I knew that 5^th graders would be able to handle some complex text and concepts.

Just like with 3^rd grade, we read Freedom Summer by Deborah Wiles, but their background information was much deeper than what 3^rd graders knew. They had connections and stories to share about the riots and peaceful marches that took place during the civil rights movement. It was the perfect opportunity for me to also pull in Revolution by Deborah Wiles. This book doesn’t publish until May 27^th, but I have an advance reader’s copy from the Texas Library Association Conference. I was able to show them some of the speeches, music, advertisements, etc from the time period to accompany the picture book, Freedom Summer.

For poetry, the 5^th graders created 2 kinds of found poetry. They used the Word Mover app on the iPad to create magnetic poetry. The app has a word bank that is words from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech. They also used pages from Freedom Summer and a couple of pages from Revolution to create blackout poetry.

This time for blackout poetry, we used the New York Times interactive site to create blackout poetry together. The site makes it very easy to select & deselect words from articles to create 15-word blackout poems. We did an example together on the board. The teacher also helped demonstrate how to mark words on their own paper by putting boxes around words in the NY Times article on the board.

We found that a good first step for students in making blackout poetry is to read or skim the page and then put boxes around words or phrases that stand out. Once you are sure of the words you want in your poem, then you blackout the rest of the page. Modeling this on the board was important today. We had very few students in 3 classes who needed to start over.

I randomly gave students pages from the books and they started the process. For the most part, it was a very quiet process. Students methodically chose their words and then quietly shared their work at their tables. A few students paired up to help each other decide on words and phrases.

As students finished their blackout poems, they grabbed an iPad and created their Word Mover poems. Just like with 2^nd grade, most students arranged their words into solid sentences rather than shaping them up like a poem. If time allowed, I conference with students and they went back into their poem to shape it into line breaks.

Almost every poem was a reflective synthesis of student understanding about events of the civil rights movement and freedom summer. Some students had some humorous twists to their poems, but most were solemn, serious, and reflective.

Take a look at their gallery. Just like Revolution immerses us in the time period through story, music, advertisements, speeches, and other documentary pieces, the student poetry immersed us in the positive and negative feelings of the civil rights movement and freedom summer through multiple perspectives.

April 24, 2014 by plemmonsa

Using Freedom Summer to Create Blackout Poetry

In third grade, students learn about civil rights through the standard:

SS3H2 The student will discuss the lives of Americans who expanded people’s
rights and freedoms in a democracy.

Students specifically learn about Mary McLeod Bethune, Frederick Douglas, and Thurgood Marshall. When these students get to 5th grade, they will spend a larger amount of time studying the civil rights movement, but I thought this would be a good time to explore some text that connected with their current understanding of civil rights.

Students spent a small amount of time sharing what they currently understand about segregation and civil rights. They brought up things like drinking from separate fountains, riding in the back of the bus, and holding boycotts of the transportation system.

Then, we read Freedom Summer by Deborah Wiles. Students immediately noticed the connections to their own understanding of segregation as the 2 main characters could not do the same things together. They were shocked when they got to the part in the story where the two boys couldn’t go to the pool because it was closed and filled in with asphalt. The students used words like unfair, lunatics, and furious when describing their feelings and the idea of closing things rather than follow the law.

After discussing the book, I showed them how some artists and poets use text that they find in the world and turn it into something new. Austin Kleon, in Austin Texas, is one of these writers and artists. We looked at a few of his poems called “blackout poems”. He takes pages from newspapers or other texts and blacks out all of the words on the page except for the words in the poem.

I gave the students one of three pages from Freedom Summer. They spent time looking for words that stood out to them as a possible poem. When they decided on the words of their poem, they circled them or drew boxes around them with a black marker. Next, they used that same marker to blackout the rest of the words on the page.

It was interesting to see how students interpreted the exact same page in a different way.

We had students share their poems at the end, and it gave us a new understanding of what stood out on the page and in the story for students. It was as if the poem helped us to look more closely at the meaning that we might all take from the text. As usual, this was more difficult for some students than others, but we noticed that this kind of poetry did take away the barrier of spelling or deciding what to write. We could instead focus on the meaning of the words on the page and use those words to interpret the story as a poem.

Here are a few of the poems that students created.

December 5, 2013 by plemmonsa

Flipgrid Book Talks with 5th Grade

A few weeks ago 5th grade reading teacher, Melissa Freeman, asked if her students could have some time in the library reading picture books and informational books related to the Civil War and Civil Rights Movement. I quickly began pulling a big stack of books for them to read. We wanted some way of capturing this experience to refer back to during Social Studies time, so I’m so glad that I discovered Flipgrid!

Each 5th grade class came to the library today. I had the books spread out on tables. We started in the floor for an overview. I shared our purpose of reading books connected with our social studies content. The teacher and I both stressed that our main goal was to spend quality time reading the books and preparing to do a book talk. Flipgrid was going to be our tool to capture these book talks, but Flipgrid was not our focus. We also talked about why Flipgrid was the chosen tool. We brainstormed ideas such as the ability to go back to these book talks during social studies to find books that matched standards. Students also thought that others in the school could visit the grid to learn about some books that they might not check out on their on.

With our purpose established, I showed students an example of what a book talk video might look like. I also quickly walked through the Flipgrid screens to show what each one looked like in order to record a video. This overview took us about 15-20 minutes.

Students each went to the tables, chose their book, and found a cozy spot to read. As students finished their reading, they got index cards and pencils to write down a few notes to help them with their book talks. Finally, they got an iPad, typed in the flipgrid code, and found a quiet spot to record.

The student response to this tool in 5th grade was very positive, but they did have some suggestions for improvement:

When they held the books up to show them on the video, the words on the books were flipped backward. We did not figure out how to fix this in the recording screens.
When students submitted their video, sometimes it put the video up to 8 times on the grid. I had to manually go in and delete the extras. We are not sure why this happened to some students and not others.
Some students received a timeout error message when uploading their videos. They had to repeatedly submit the video until they got the successful upload message.

I typed all of these comments in an email and sent it to Flipgrid support. We hope that we hear some answers to these issues or see Flipgrid continue to improve. Even with the technical problems, the students all hope that their teacher and I will continue to use this tool.

Listen to their book talks here. Students will continue to add videos to grid during their reading class with Mrs. Freeman.