Sunday, January 5, 2020

PebbleGo Curiosity Cards & 10 Ways To Use Them!

 I was so excited to get this little surprise in the mail from my friends at Capstone over the holiday.
They are the PebbleGo Curiosity Cards and as the playing card box says they Spark curiosity and inspire inquiry with 52 distinct questions that be answered by searching within PebbleGo. 
The 52 PebbleGo Curiosity Cards focus around four of the modules including Animals, Science, Biographies and Social Studies.  
As a card is picked, the icon will give a clue on which PebbleGo module to use for the research.

I can think of LOTS of ways to use the PebbleGo Curiosity Cards to spark learning, inquiry, creativity and fun.  Here are 10 ways! 

1. The PebbleGo Curiosity Cards can be used as a group activity with an entire class.  You can have two or more teams and have them draw a card to see which module they will use to research the question.

2. You can also split the class into four groups and give each one of them a different PebbleGo module to focus on that day.  They can be the PebbleGo Science, PebbleGo Biographies, PebbleGo Social Studies and PebbleGo Animals Teams!

3. With multiple packs, you can put the class into small groups and have them take turns playing and researching in PebbleGo to answer the questions and learn from each other.

For a little twist to all of these ways to use the cards, how about having them act out the question or answer and have classmates guess?  That would be fun!
4. Extend the learning that is happening while playing with the PebbleGo Curiosity Cards by having them use Buncee as an online research journal to document what they are learning through the research and learning.  Here is a blog post sharing how we used Buncee to created PebbleGo Research Journals.

As a teacher or librarian, you can then take all of the pages they make in Buncee and use the Stitching feature to make a PebbleGo Curiosity Cards eBook to share with other students, teachers and families. Buncee's can even be shared with others around the world!

You can learn more about the Stitching feature in Buncee here.

5. Use the PebbleGo Curiosity Cards as story or research starters.  Students draw a card and then write a creative story tying in what they learn through the research in PebbleGo.
For example, they draw the card that says How many season are there?  After researching in the PebbleGo Science module, they write a story or journal entry focused on what they learned about seasons.

6.  Along the same idea, they could even paint, draw or build with LEGO's, recycled materials, KEVA Planks or other building materials to show the answer and what they learned in PebbleGo around the answer to the question.
7. Use the PebbleGo Curiosity Cards as topics to spark research and conversations in Flipgrid 

For our students at Van Meter, I created a new Grid in Flipgrid called PebbleGo Curiosity Cards! 
I took one of the PebbleGo Curiosity Cards that focused on a topic our first graders are focusing on in January.  I created a Flipgrid Topic around that card adding an image of the card and typed out directions for the students.  

In the Flipgrid Topics, you can even add links so I added one to PebbleGo Science, the module they will be using for this topic. 

8.  They are great for inspiring your learners! 

After the PebbleGo Curiosity Cards are used in a variety of ways, ask students to pick one of the cards they would like to expand on for a project-based learning experience.  Give them a choice on how they want to extend their learning through more research in PebbleGo and by using other books and eBooks.   

9. They can also take one of their favorite PebbleGo Curiosity Cards to create an Adobe Spark Video finding images within the platform and adding what they learned.  

10. Last, but not least, there is a lot of  FUN they can have with the PebbleGo Curiosity Cards.  They can pick them up to play for fun with a friend in the library, classroom or even outside or for indoor recess. 

And what about having sets available for check out from the library to take home to play with their families.  What a wonderful and easy way to inspire family engagement. 
Thank you, Capstone for creating the PebbleGo Curiosity Cards for our learners and for bringing us so many other things through pebblego.com/resources and more! 

The Curiosity Cards will be available from Capstone soon, friends.  

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