Non Fiction Riddles, Video, and the Explain Everything App

Yesterday, my students and I started a discussion about eggs because we are doing a collaborative project about dying eggs naturally Click here to see the project. The discussion morphed into questions regarding which animals hatch from eggs. I pulled out a bunch of pictures of animals and poof, our inquiry was born.   I then spread out the different pictures of animals and on purple construction paper, I scribbled down the headings yes, no and maybe to sort the animals.  Yes, they hatch from eggs, No they don't hatch from eggs and Maybe, they hatch from eggs because we don't know.  I had my students discuss the different animals and give reasons why they thought the way they did.  I was very happy with the conversations that were taking place in my room, the students were discussing how they knew if a particular animal did or did not hatch from an egg.  Two of my students were debating if dinosaurs hatched from eggs and I heard one student say, "I read it in a book." and the other student asked, "Are you sure you read it in a non fiction book?"  
As you can see from the picture, we had 7 pictures in the maybe column.  Students were very excited to  choose one of the animals in the "Maybe" column, write their prediction in their thinking books and went to work trying to find a book in our library to prove if their animal hatched from an egg or not.
After students found the answer, they wrote it in their thinking books.

Day 2

The next day my students were still very eager to learn and talk about all the animals that hatched from eggs. I wanted to continue with the excitement and have them write a riddle about an animal that hatched from an egg.  I read the book, "Chickens Aren't The Only Ones" to my students. This is the perfect book for discovering the variety of oviparous animals and their unique ways of laying eggs.

I then modeled how to write a riddle about an oviparous animal and we created one together as a class.  I then let them loose.  


After the students completed their riddles, we took it one step farther.  I had the students make a video on the Explain Everything app reading their riddle and showing the answer to their riddle.  This was the first time my students used the new video option on the iPad, and for the most part they recorded themselves reading their riddle themselves by turning the camera around so it was facing them as they read their riddle.   My students were ecstatic to see the final result, and of course they posted them to their blogs!  Here is one of my grade one student's videos: