Mystery Skype with Third Grade

Mrs. Stamey and Mrs. Robertson at Icard Elementary have been excellent to work with this year! They have been eager and willing when I bring them an idea for an activity. We've muscled through some iffy situations with geocaching... (mowers, weather, and satellites), but we've had great success with both of our "Mystery Skype" sessions.

We met up in the media center, each student had a job, armed with index cards, and iPad, or a map and marker. This was a simplified version of how we participated in the middle school setting. The 3rd graders needed only to find the state of the partner class. Our first attempt went really well in that we asked a difficult question that had to be answered with both a yes and a no, which led us pretty quickly to where they were. Our second session was definitely a learning experience for the young geographers. We were the 7th call of the day for our partner class, and boy did they have their questioning down pat. We took away some question ideas from them. Here are some example questions we'll remember for next time:

Is your state one of the 13 colonies?
Does your state border an ocean? (Not a specific ocean.)
Does your state being with a consonant/vowel?
Does your state have a cardinal direction in its name?
Does your state have two words in its name?

Even the students took notice to the questions we were being asked. They acknowledged that they were being asked some really good questions, and they would come back and ask our partner class the exact same question we had been asked. We all learned a lot from that group! Can't wait to get a schedule going so we can do this more regularly next school year!!

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