Brown Bear Comes to Thorncliffe Park
The primary DD program at Thorncliffe Park P.S. received a Promethean Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) for their classroom through the Group SEA Claim process. Classrooms who received SEA IWBs were supported throughout the school year through Learning Communities and co-plan/co-teach job embedded learning opportunities. Donna MacKinnon, Primary DD Teacher of this program, co-planned and co-taught a lesson with Itinerant Resource Teacher, Renée Keberer, supporting this Learning Community.
Donna’s students have been actively using their IWB, so a lesson was designed about reading and interacting with the book “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” on the Promethean Board. Using the ActiView document camera, screenshots of the book were taken so that the book could be displayed on the IWB. As the story is interactive in nature (sliding tabs and finding objects), this was recreated using various IWB tools. The students would take turns coming up to the IWB to reveal the various animals hidden on the page as the story was read. After the book was finished, independent follow up activities were created for each student to meet their individual needs and ability levels. Some activities were one-to-one matching, selecting the correct item to match, and matching the correct colour to the item. The students were able to navigate to their specific work page by touching either their name or photograph, which would directly link to their activity. While the students completed their independent task at the IWB, the other students were at different centres around the classroom completing various tasks.
Teachers who observed the lesson were impressed with the engagement of the students and their proficiency with the Promethean Board.
