Forest encyclopedia

Author: class II B (grade 7), I.S. Abbé J.M. Trèves, Saint-Vincent, Vallée d' Aoste (IT),
PARTNERS: Class II A (grade 7), I.S. Abbé J.M. Trèves, Saint-Vincent, Vallée d' Aoste (IT); class grade V, CEIP Plurilingue Espiñera Aldán (ES).

Introduction

L'encyclopédie de la forêt

Our topic for the Green S.E.E.D.S project is “Forest heritage as an economic, social and environmental value”. Students reflected on what this topic means and what they wanted to do as school activity, what could be meaningful for them. This Seedquest has been co-constructed with students.

Learning Objectives

Teamworking
Display their feelings about the forest in different kinds of products (video, images…)
Follow instructions to create a video, a short presentation
Discuss and find solutions working in pairs
Designing a website
Using different languages: Italian, French, English

Task

Mountain forest

The task is to create a website with what students think is relevant about the forest heritage. On this website there will be information about forests in our region (Aosta Valley) and some original products from students: videos, presentations, images, drawings. The aim is to promote the forest not only as a place of interest under a scientific point of view, but also to look at it as a place where to find inspirations, to practice sport, to feel emotions.

Process

Brainstorming in class on topic “forest heritage” topic;
Collecting ideas on forest heritage;
Find some points of interest and vote the activity to be done; in this case students made many propositions, so we decided to collect all their ideas on a website called “Forest encyclopedia”;
Create some teams for working together, working alone also possible;
Sharing ideas and different work stages;
Students work on different activities: videos, photos, presentations, time-lapse, interviews, writing songs, making some drawings, searching scientific information on forests, plants, flowers...
Students translate their product into French and fill the website in with all the activities;
Presentation to the Spanish class

Evaluation

Knowledge acquired

What is a website and how to organize it
What is an encyclopedia
The importance of forests

Skills acquired

Know how to do a brainstorming
Surf the internet and find interesting information
Work in team
Use different tools to realise an idea
Building a website

Competences acquired

Responsibility of a teamwork
Build its own project and find place, time and resources (web, classmates, teachers) to achieve it
Multilingual competences
Digital competences
Entrepreneurship competence
Personal, social and learning to learn competence

Conclusion

This work was really interesting and it was done with joy and involvement by students. They produced many contents:

A collection of photos, images and timelapse on forest
A video made by a drone flying over a forest and a description of what is seen
A research on plants, flowers, animals
A song rewritten about the awareness on environment
An interview with a Forest Ranger
Some videos on sport made by students in the forest (ski, downhill, trail, trekking)
A video on a recipe with local products
A comic about young people and the environment