The Blogging Connection: A Guest Post by Sarah Gorbatov

This post was written by Sarah Gorbatov. follow her blogging on Come Somersault with Sarah!

I have had many great memories during my years blogging, but my favorite has been learning about our world in Mrs. Yollis’ third grade class. Mrs. Yollis has a class blog that describes her class activities with students, parents, and other teachers around the world.  During the middle of the year, we had a project called “Our World Our Stories.” Students from seven elementary schools from three different continents and six different countries (Australia, New Zealand, U.S.A, Canada, Ghana, and Belize) participated. Each class led a topic and published a post every week, and all other classes would leave questions and comments. Some of the topics discussed were school games, hobbies, favorite foods, and each classes’ environment. Through this activity, I learned about the daily activities of children around the world. It also taught me about the difficult life that children in some of the other countries have.

When it was our turn to lead, we wrote about our favorite schoolyard game at Chaparral Elementary School called Bamboo. The game is played with two parallel bars and two people on opposite sides trying to tag each other. As part of our post, we included a video of how the game was played. The best part of the day was when our nature-loving teacher, Mrs. Yollis, joined in the fun. She was smiling from ear to ear as she played and tagged most of my friends and me.  In addition, she brought our class mascot, a fluffy, soft bear named Beverly, out to play. One week later, we were pleasantly surprised to receive a video from our blogging classroom friends, Canada and Australia, of their classes playing the exact same game of Bamboo and having a marvelous time. The project Our World Our Stories came to an end once every school had a turn to lead a topic. To honor this project, we had a small celebration through video. Every class put together a video of their school singing a verse of the song “Make New Friends.” The teachers then put all the verses together to create the entire song sung by the seven classes. It was interesting to hear everyone singing it with different accents.

We also learned about the world through Skyping with numerous different classes all over the world. My favorite class was in Australia, where my best blogging friend lives. We both regularly comment on each other’s blogs and have learned many interesting things about one another. The biggest challenge was the time difference. We Skyped at the end of our day, which was the beginning of their school day. Sometimes we were so involved that we would lose track of time and stay after school to continue our conversations.

In addition to regular Skyping, we also had mystery Skypes. This was when we didn’t know who we were skyping with and would try to find out what country, continent, or state they lived in from the clues they gave us. Our class worked as a team to be successful and find the location of the other classroom. Each child had a specific job, such as Question Keepers to type the questions and answers, Inquirers to ask questions, and Google Mappers to review atlases for clues. Some of our mystery Skype calls were with classrooms in Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Iowa. Sometimes our class guessed the location first, and sometimes the other class would win. However, both classes always had a great time and learned a lot about each other and the map of the United States. I always looked forward to the next mystery Skype call.

Through this blogging experience, I have learned about the world and made new virtual friends. It also made me feel very lucky to be living in the United States, because in countries such as Belize and Ghana, they were very poor and didn’t have as many things as we have here, such as a nice playground and school supplies. Now that I am in fourth grade, I have my own blog and continue publishing posts on my experiences.  I also stay in touch with my blogging friends, who have taught me many things about their cities, and I try to make new friends through the blogging community.

[For Reference, below is the URL to the Our World Our Stories final celebration and the recess game Bamboo. http://ourworldourstories.edublogs.org/2011/12/07/our-final-celebration/ http://ourworldourstories.edublogs.org/2011/11/23/favorite-recess-game-california/]

The Ugandan Global Project: A Guest Post by Miriam Gorbatov

This post was written by Miriam Gorbatov, follow her blogging on Miriam's Magical Moments.

In all my years of blogging, I have had many different memories, but this memory was beyond great.  In third grade, my teacher, Mrs. Yollis, got the class involved in blogging.  This was an amazing opportunity to learn about the lives of other children around the world.  The highlight of the year for me was the Uganda Project.  We corresponded with a class in Australia, a class at Chaparral Elementary School, one in China, and one in Connecticut. We all wanted to keep this school in Uganda from losing a piece of land that they used as a playground. This class in Uganda, Africa, was grateful for anything they received.  The children had to walk three miles to school and three miles back just to get a good education. In contrast, the children in America often get driven to school even if the school is within a few minutes’ walking distance. They were also grateful to have any meals they could receive.  I felt heartbroken that we have anything we want, but they had nothing.  I also admired how hard they worked to receive an education.  Our school was determined to help save their playground.  Together, the five different classes organized a three mile walk around the neighborhood to raise money for the school.  

The five classes started the walk at the same time, at 10:00 am.  After walking for only ten minutes everyone was pretty exhausted.  But we all knew that we were going to finish the walk to help the school whether or not we were tired.  When we finally finished walking, we sang a song that we learned from one of the other classes. The song was about saying hello in all different languages. Though everyone was exhausted from the walk, we were still really enthusiastic about helping the class in Uganda.  I had learned a very important lesson that day that one should be grateful for anything one has or has an opportunity to do because these children are struggling even to get meals or a piece of land to play on with no playground.  

Over the next week, we continued to collect donations to help the school in Uganda. Mrs. Yollis taught us about the different types of currency from all of the countries. The teachers then counted up all the donations from all of the other classes that did the walk.  All the schools involved collected a total of $19,592. The teachers sent the money to Uganda, and we got a response saying that they had enough money to purchase the land for the ABC Divine Foundation Primary School, ensuring the children now have somewhere to play. We have also provided enough money for the school to start building a sheltered kitchen and dining hall. Everyone was very cheerful because all our hard work had paid off on our project, and it had been a great success.

This experience has inspired me to continue blogging about my experiences and travels. I hope to one day become an elementary school teacher and share what I have learned with my students.

[For Reference, below is the URL to our walk. http://ugandanglobalproject.blogspot.com/2010/10/california-walks-for-uganda.html]