I’ve been working with Siham Caudarella and the students of her Grade 6 class this year on an international project called Art Miles. This is one of the fabulous iEARN.org projects that make global collaboration fun and a great learning experience for students. Art Miles is a new one for me this year; I’ve been lucky enough to take part in a few over the years and have written about them elsewhere.
Art Miles Japan involves connecting with a classroom in Japan and collaborating on a theme for a mural. We are connected with Masaaki Kato’s Grade 6 class from Nuka Elementary School and in our case, we chose the theme of sharing nature and culture in our respective cities. The Japanese class begins by painting the first half of the mural, and we complete the second half. We began by introducing ourselves to our partner class through a video, and then we visited their city and neighbourhood via Google Earth. Although we would have liked to arrange a Skype or Google Hangout, the time change did not work in our favour this time around. 😦
Yesterday was such an exciting day! The box arrived as soon as school resumed in January, and we got together to open the box and see what was inside. We were sent paint and the mural and lots of discussion and wonderings came out from students and teachers…
What was the mural made of? How did the other class decide on their symbols for images? What do the images represent? How will we learn to write our names in Japanese so that we can sign the mural? What kind of paint are we using and how will we solve the problem of reading the Japanese on the paint cans? Should we paint our scene in the same season in order to blend the two sides or should we make our section look really different?
We’ll be busy planning, drafting and painting in the next few weeks — stay tuned for the final product. In the meantime, we capture a few moments of the mural’s exciting arrival here:
Learning Zone 