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Project-based learning is becoming more popular among classrooms as your child and other students are given the chance to enhance their learning in a new and innovative way. With the use of new technology, teachers such as myself can capture students’ interests while they learn to work together and share ideas, improve communication skills, and express themselves through a variety of ways. Recently we have engaged your student in the steps to obtaining a classroom pet. By involving them in the procedure to this decision, they were be given the chance to voice their opinions and take on an important role where they learned skills that will be sufficient later on in their personal lives and in the workplace.

We feel that the projects your children are involved in should be realistic which will help them learn how the world works. We believe that starting children out at a younger age will provide them with greater knowledge and success in their future. Within the process of obtaining our classroom pet, we as teachers shift our usual leadership roles and allow the students to become the content experts and essentially take on the role of the teacher. Technology can provide students with a mass amount of information and give them a chance to analyze information through several different forms of media. For instance, your children have been able to view information through a movie created by their teachers and use programs on the computer such as powerpoint or excel. Technology also helps them to connect to others. By being able to reach beyond the classroom, students experienced how to express themselves which essentially improved their communication skills.

As teachers we also know that when you get a group of students together who obtain different views on a topic, there tends to be conflict. As part of our learning experience, managing conflict is an important concept. Students learned how to manage their own team conflicts which is a real-life skill that they will forever use. Together, students agreed on their personal roles and responsibilities. At the end of the project, both a self-assessment and group evaluation were given to see how well the students worked together. During the time that the students were working, the teachers walked around in order to help provide greater achievement and to keep students on task.

Many different aspects are involved in the decision for obtaining a classroom pet. Your child’s interest has be captured from the start and by involving them and allowing them to experience each step to this process, the students not only learned useful skills such as team building but had fun at the same time.