Day 10: Beginning Boardmaker Plus

It started with a required assignment to develop a communication board for Sara and grew into an exciting idea of an enrichment project for all of the students in Sara's class...

Today we were introduced to Boardmaker Plus. Barb did a really detailed and quite helpful "how to get started" tutorial, and then Bev and I started to work on Assignment Five, the final assignment fot this course. Now, this is how I like to learn: a person-to-person tutorial filled with just-in-time learning!

Our task is to use Boardmaker Plus to create two communication boards for Sara, a Grade 7 student. Sara is wheelchair dependent, non-verbal, and uses a single switch with her elbow as her control site. Sara has good receptive language, emerging literacy skills, and has an IPP for all subjects.

Bev and I agreed to develop a communication board to help Sara achieve IPP goals in communications and Social Studies, specifically the content area of the Settlers unit in Grade 7. We spent the rest of the morning planning a Boardmaker book about Grand Pre and the story of the deportation of the Acadians. Sara will be able to read the story independently as she prepares for the summative assessment on the unit, which will also be created in Boardmaker.

It is my thought that this Boardmaker project for Sara could be quickly linked to a more extensive multimedia WebQuest Language Arts/ Social Studies project for the full class. A couple of ideas follow...

Even in the content research, this has been an interesting project for me. To discover that the Evangeline story of the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia to be sent by ship to places as far away as Louisanne is a story that I was not familiar with. If you want to read the full poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (and published in 1847), you can click this link, but if you want the abbreviated version of the story, the Wikipedia article summarizes with

"Evangeline describes the betrothal of an Acadian girl named Evangeline Bellefontaine to her beloved, Gabriel Lajeunesse, and their separation as the British deport the Acadians from Acadie in the Great Upheaval. The poem then follows Evangeline across the landscapes of America as she spends years in a search for him, at some times being near to Gabriel without realizing he was near. Finally she settles in Philadelphia and, as an old woman, works as a Sister of Mercy among the poor. While tending the dying during an epidemic she finds Gabriel among the sick, and he dies in her arms."

The Grand Pre National Historic Site is a truly interesting national historic site, and it's less than 5km from Wolfville.

Finally, if you are "of a certain age" as am I, then you may enjoy this classic tune written with the story of Evangeline in mind, and written and performed by America's Emmylou Harris and Canada's The Band. This is a video clip from the 1976 documentary filmed by Martin C. Scorsese , "The Last Waltz" film, a significant fore runner for today's music videos, in my humble opinion. My thought is that students of music and/or film would also benefit from researching the contributions made to popular music by The Band (and Robbie Robinson) during the 1970's. Of course, these ideas also support differentiated instruction and seeking resources to match different learning styles -- a win-win situation for Sara and all of her classmates. What can I say - I've worked with gifted students for the past four years and it's just how MY brain works, this starting with the seed of an idea for one student that grows into some great learning potential for a whole group of students. What fun is that!