Social
Studies Grade 1, Cluster2
Learning About My Province and Country
My class received postcards from across Canada almost every week throughout the past school year and learned so much about our fabulous country!
Preparation:
I registered my class for the Canadian Postcard Exchange project in August at: Pro Teacher. The
organizer, Betty Welch, a teacher from Sylvan Lake, Alberta organizes the entire project and works hard to ensure that at least one school from each province and territory isinvolved. She sent a schedule for
when each class was to send their postcards. I prepared a bulletin board with
a Canada map in the centre and an outline of a bar graph with provinces and
territories as categories. I also
created a black line master for recording interesting facts about each
community that sends us a postcard.
These were placed in a binder.
Introduction
I asked students if they have ever
seen/received a postcard and showed them samples of postcards. We brainstormed for ideas to write
about to tell people about facts and special things about our school and
community. Next, we decided on a picture idea and
created a postcard using Microsoft Publisher. Once our postcards were completed, we took a mini-fieldtrip to
the tiny post office in Newton to mail them. Postcard Lesson
As
the postcards arrived: I read them to my class and had students relate several
interesting facts from the postcard; recorded them to BLM. I also had them note the
symbol on the postage stamp. We used
Google maps (on our SMARTboard) to look up the communities they come from and graphed what province or
territory the postcards are from. Students
located the community on the BB Canada map and stapled postcard to BB and drew
lines from the postcard to the location on the map.
After the first few weeks of reading postcards as soon as they arrived, we designated Friday as “Postcard” reading day.
At
the end of the year, we took down the postcards. I suggest allowing time for students to enjoy
and reminisce. We created a concrete
postcard graph on our Learning Carpet and checked if the data on this graph matched
that of the bar graph. In
addition, we compiled a scrapbook which includes all the postcards in the
interesting facts BLMs. This proved to be
rather time-consuming, so I suggest numbering the postcards as you post them on
the BB which would make the year-end scrapbook project easier. I encourage all primary classrooms to sign up for a great year of learning about Canada one postcard at a time! Just click on the link above to register your class.
