By Margarita Dakoronia, Roberta Colombo and Despina Armenaki

Schools: 32nd Primary School of Piraeus-Greece, IC di Merate Italy, 3rd Primary School of Chios-Greece

Age students: 7-10 years

Dates: 1^st of March 2021 – 10^th of April 2021

Our sources: Europeana for Howard and Constable, Esa kids, Science kids, For the experiments

Used web 2.0 tools

For brainstorming: Gocongr, Bookcreator

For videos: Windows 10, YouTube

For photo collage: Canva, be funky, Pixiz

For puzzles: jigsaw

For the timeline: timetoast

Our goals

1- To encourage children in their active online participation
2- To strengthen their active participation through the assumption of roles
3- To develop children’s imagination and creativity
4- To encourage children to observe, to experiment, to draw conclusions, to make inventions, to make constructions, to get in touch with art, to present their work.
5- To manage to cooperate with the rest members of the group
6- To gain STEM skills

Summary

As part of the eTwinning project, weather broadcast by curious detectives, three of the collaborating schools designed and implemented the activity, ”what about clouds’‘. Both schools were in online classes while the third was not. So we started with the water cycle, its evaporation and liquefaction. But what piqued the children’s interest were the clouds. The questions were many and so we focused on the study of clouds.

Procedure

• We started with brainstorming by gathering the children’s questions.
• Then we created a video story, where we narrated some basic facts about clouds. It was sent to our digital classrooms; we watched it with the children and discussed the clouds.
• We divided the children into groups: scientists, journalists, mathematicians, engineers, artists and writers.

We searched the scientist who was the first to name the clouds, Luke Howard, in the 19 century and influenced the discoveries of both the scientists and the artists of his time.

Scientists should present us with experiments in which the laboratory would create weather data.

The three groups of scientists presented the following experiments:

• I create a cloud.
• Snow and rainbows in the lab.
• I notice the difference between frost and dew.

The Journalists’ groups created three weather broadcasts. 

This was a lot of fun as we exchanged and learned words that have to do with weather and each group presented the bulletin in each other’s language. We set a specific time and day; the children took a photo of their city, observed the weather in the area of ​​the school and spoke in the language of their friends.

The mathematicians’ groups created graphs based on the weather data that they recorded for a month.

The artists groups presented us, with artcrafts and paintings, the types of clouds and the layers of the air. They met Constable, the painter who was influenced by Howard, and the types of clouds, and they also painted and described landscapes dominated by clouds. They played puzzles with Constable paintings.

The engineers groups created meteorological instruments of rainwater and wind, based on the books of Howard where we found the wonderful repository of  Europeana .

The writers’ groups wrote their own stories: If I were a cloud I wish I would be… and wrote their wishes on clouds and rainbows.

Most of these activities took place online over the course of a month, exchanging material through our digital classrooms. The presentations and discussions took place through our online meetings (Webex) and the children’s creations were sent to our digital classrooms (Goggle classroom and dojo). The selection of individuals in the group was initially random, with the children playing an online game. But in order for all the children to participate in all the roles in the rest of the implementation period of the e – twinning project, there was an alternation of roles and groups.

The benefits of these activities in addition to the realization of our initial goals was the joy we saw in the eyes of our students through the cold image of the computer during our online lessons.