Throughout the world, natural disasters have struck leaving many people hungry. As my students learn more about the Myanmar tragedy and the Myanmar’s governments neglect to provide aide, they have discussed their desire to help. A website www.freerice.com is a website that allows them to do just that. There is no sign-up necessary! Students go to this website and play a vocabulary game. Words are presented and students are asked to choose the synonym. The students love to play and they learn new words. The whole time they are playing, they are infact helping to donate rice to the hungry. For each word the player gets correct, 20 grains of rice through the UN World Food Program to help end hunger. This game has been online since October 2007. I wish I had known about it sooner! To date, 32,538,647,330 grains of rice have been donated through this game. Yesterday, 193,454,560 grains of rice were donated! This is an amazing program! Our class is going to play as much as we can to help!
I think it is truly important to expose students to the happenings in the world around them. A great way to inform students of current events is through the use of CNN Student News, http://www.cnn.com/studentnews/ This is a free tool that teachers may sign-up for. Each night, an e-mail is sent in that you may preview the content. For the most part, the content is appropriate for my fourth grade students. About three times a week, we watch the 10 minute segment and then discuss the content. The reals focused on the Presidential Election have proven to be a great resource. This past week we focused on the tragedy of the cyclone that hit Myanmar. My students have been motivated to write their own news stories to inform their fellow school mates about the tragedy. Discovery Atlas has provided to be a great resource as well. We used Atlas to locate Myanmar and learn about the people, government, customs, and history using the short video segments. I used the Writing Prompts Teacher Tool to create the News Story Assignment. Our class wrote great news stories to demonstrate their understanding of the event and share their feelings about the tragedy. I am impressed with the caliber of work produced by these fourth graders. Their enthusiasm and motivation was enhanced through the use of the technology and tools provided by Discovery Streaming!
