Wikis for Wittle Ones

From TeachersFirst:   http://www.teachersfirst.com/single.cfm?id=5474

  

Wiki ideas for younger students (elementary):

• An annotated virtual library: listings and commentary on independent reading students have done throughout the year
• collaborative book reviews or author studies
  An elementary class “encyclopedia” on a special topic, such as explorers or state history – to be continued and added to each year!
• A virtual tour of your school as you study “our community” in elementary grades
• A travelogue from a field trip or NON- field trip that the class would have liked to take as A culmination of a unit of study: Our (non) trip to the Capital and what we (wish) we saw.
• Detailed and illustrated descriptions of scientific or governmental processes: how a bill becomes a law, how mountains form, etc.
  A wiki “fan club” for you favorite author(s).
• Family Twaditionwiki- elementary students share their family’s ways of preparing Thanksgiving dinner or celebrating birthdays (anonymously, of course) and compare them to practices in other cultures they read and learn about.
• A Where is Wanda wiki: a wiki version of the ever-favorite Flat Stanley project. Have each Wanda host post on the wiki, including the picture they take with Wanda during her visit. Even better: keep an ongoing Google Earth placemarker file to add geographic visuals to Wanda’s wonderful wanderings as a link in the wiki. WOW! Where in the world IS Wiki Wanda?

My thoughts on the above:

These are all great ideas!

I'm thinking it would be pretty motivating for my third-graders to create a "Wiktionary."  Each week they are supposed to find three or four "Juicy Words" from their "Just-Right" reading books.  These are books that are not too hard and not too easy, and in which they should occasionally encounter unfamiliar vocabulary.  They are asked to create a semantic map for one word and put that word and two others into sentences that show they know the meaning of the word.  It would be great if they could compile these into a class "Wiktionary" to share with each other, with their families and with posterity.

I think it might behoove me to get a parent involved with editing for clarity and appropriateness before it goes to publication.