Minecraft Mission Santa Barbara (photo credit: S. Tabaldo)
This year (2017-18) my youngest child is finally in 4th grade and in California that is the year we study the 21 missions. My two daughters had to build their missions (without a kit thank you very much) and we did let them do most of it on their own. I will say that mission San Diego de Alcalá & Nuestra Señora de la Soledad turned out just fine. This year was different because we had our choice of medium in which to “build” the mission, and my son chose Minecraft!
After visiting the Santa Barbara mission over Christmas break we had what we needed for the mission to be built (lots of photos) and a book with the history of the mission for the accompanying paper.
In true teacher fashion #teacherparent we backwards planned so we knew how many nights we needed to work on the project & paper to have it completed by the due date.
He built the mission in Minecraft over a period of about 2 weeks. We were using Minecraft Pocket Edition on the iPad. Once complete we used the screen recording feature in iOS 11 to record a “tour” of the mission. Once saved in my camera roll, we uploaded it to my YouTube Channel. *Note there is no audio with the iPad recording, which was fine because he had to narrate as part of the in-class presentation.*
The paper was a harder sell for this kid. We started with the three interesting things he was going to write about (turned out to be four). We noted that on a page in his notebook titled “body”. Then we thought about what might need to be in the intro and conclusion and jotted that down too.
We then had to turn the bullets into a paragraph (a challenge with this guy is the writing). We drafted the paragraphs in the notebook as well. Then magic happened!!! Our timeline on this was 1 day Intro/Conclusion draft, 1 day Body bullets draft, 1 day, Intro paragraph, 1 day Conclusion paragraph, 1 day Body paragraphs. (1 week total for draft writing paper)
Proofreading & editing (Photo credit: S. Tabaldo)
Using Google, we turned on the voice to text feature. He then began to speak what we had written earlier in the notebook and Google typed it for us. (1 day) On our final day of of the project, we learned how to proof read and edit in Google Docs. (1 day)
This was a great project. We learned so many skills, planning, timelines, bullet notes, paragraph writing, Google voice to text tool, speaking clearly, proofreading and presenting just to name a few. Here is a link to the instructions sent home by the teacher. Shout out to our 4th grade teacher, and all the 4th grade teachers out there! You are AWESOME!
