The 6th graders have been busy working on their Kiva Advertisement project. While I haven't had an opportunity to post, it's not because we haven't been working. As in years past, I introduced the project with the driving question, How can we create advertisements that encourage new and existing kiva lenders to make a loan in _(blank)__ geographic area? In addition to that driving question, and inspired alongside my own grad school work on research, I decided to concentrate on the following questions:
How can we be better consumers of statistical representations?
How can we be better creators of statistical representations?
My goal for the Kiva project this year, on top of getting my students to empower many lives across the globe, is take a look at the rubrics, grading process, research components and intentionality of everything we do. The first stop on this "Year of Change" was to recruit the help of the library team in the hopes that we could create some common language, reinforce protocols for using sources, and discuss citations. We got this and a whole lot more.
Ms Stuart visited our classroom after the launch and provided examples of advertisements that were much more similar to what we were looking for then the examples I had been able to provide in the past. While I had never heard of Ad Council, I certainly had a good time reminiscing about some of their famous commercials, "This is drugs, this is your brain on drugs, any questions?". To learn more about Ad Council you can watch this quick video . Ad Council fits right into what we are trying to accomplish in our project and I am so glad Ms. Stuart introduced us.
The boys were not only engaged in the examples provided but they were also very knowledgeable abut appropriate sources, creative commons and the libraries resources. So, I pushed them on their way to discover a little bit about Kiva and the countries they decided to focus on. At this point, they have all had short interviews with me where they presented the statistics they are going to use to convince others and are about to begin creating. Commercials, Infographic Posters, Brochures and more... all coming your way soon from the GARAGE! Stay tuned, we are just getting started!