CDC Kindergartners Prepare for Earth Day with Padlet and Answer Garden

As part of their celebration of Earth Day on April 22nd,  the CDC Kindergartners are participating in Buncee Buddies: Earth Day 2016, a global initiative designed to connect classes from around the world in researching and sharing ways we can save and protect our Earth.  Across the week the kindergartners will be exploring the topic both at the CDC and the AT&T Classroom through hands-on experiences and digital resources available through PBS EekoWorld and  Primary Games-Earth Day. The children will be sharing what they have learned about the topic using Buncee, a web-based creation tool for designing interactive multimedia projects. At the end of the week the kindergartners will share their Earth Day Buncees with a “Mystery Buddy Class” who is also participating in the project. Prior to exchanging their Buncee Earth Day projects, the two classes will be meeting in a Google Hangout on Wednesday afternoon to guess one another’s location. This afternoon in the AT&T Classroom the kindergartners prepared for their Buncee project work and their “Google Mystery Meeting” using Padlet, a free web-based tool that functions as a virtual wall or bulletin board where people can exchange thoughts on a common topic. The collaborative nature of the tool allows the children to view one another’s comments as they are posted. This afternoon the class created a Padlet wall as they brainstormed key questions that will help them guess the location of their mystery buddy class during Wednesday’s virtual meeting with the class. In preparation for their Buncee projects, they created a second Padlet wall where each child posted one way to save and protect our Earth. 

At the end of the session, the kindergartners replied to a prompt posted in Answer Garden asking them to guess the location of their Mystery Buncee Buddies. Answer Garden is a free online tool that can be used for polling and brainstorming. As each child posted their reply, a virtual garden grew of the responses, with more frequently occurring responses appearing in larger font size.