Since both Mrs. Caldwell and I are looping up with our students this year, we have the benefit of resuming our collaboration this year with students who already know each other. Since my class has been working diligently to publish the pigeon books they started last year in Grade 1, they were excited to share their work with the Kindergartens. On our first Skype call of the year, our class shared one of our own pigeon stories and explained that Mo Willems is one of our favorite authors. We challenged the Kindergartens to find and read a Mo Willems book in their school and my students summarized some of the notable features of his work (a hilarious pigeon character, lots of speech bubbles and interesting text features such as bold words and capitalized phrases).
Not long after, I realized that my students had influenced Mrs. Caldwell’s kindergartens in a big way. We noticed they were tweeting about the pigeon and, when they Skyped us to listen to more of my students’ stories, we learned that they were reading many of the Mo Willems pigeon stories. Soon, the Kindergartens were telling my class that they hoped to write their very own pigeon story. We heard that they were learning to draw pigeons and ducklings. Our passion for the pigeon character is spreading!
My class continues to publish their pigeon stories and share them online through our classroom blog and Twitter. Both classes agreed to hashtag tweets #pigeonproject to keep track of all the exciting work we’re doing. I’m thrilled to see how this pigeon project will continue to grow and develop!