We are excited to welcome our Pre-AP students to iEarn  (the International Education and Resource Network ) in a collaborative writing project with eight other teachers and their students from around the country and the world!

Over the next fifteen weeks, we will be learning more about each other and ourselves as we plan a writing project together and exchange our composition work with each other.  Eventually, all ten of our classes will produce a literary magazine highlighting the best of our writing.  The theme and format of that final product has yet to be determined by the students, but that’s part of the fun:  deciding together what it is that we will accomplish.

First things first, though.  We’ve got to open the lines of communication and get to know more about each other.  We teachers have made our first posts to the teachers’ forum, and over the next couple of weeks, students will be creating, taking, and then sharing a survey of who they are as a group of young WRMS Wildcats, Austinites, and Texans.  We’ll gather items for  “welcome packets” (eight of them!) that we can send to our fellow iEarn classes.  As we await welcome packets in exchange,  we’ll be proactive in learning more about the home states and countries of the schools we are collaborating with.

We’ll officially get started on the project next week, but in the meantime, meet our iEarn partners:

Ms. Hockert from Hixson, Tennessee, United States
Ms. Gorelova from Sarov, Nizhny, Russia
Ms. Graham from Dolores, Colorado, United States
Ms. Popa from Botosani, Romania
Ms. Shabbir from Karachi, Pakistan
Ms. Suaib from Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia
Ms. Zubair from Rawalpindi, Punjab, Pakistan
Ms. Mitrofanova from Belarus

Students, do some exploring of these places on your own between now and Monday.  Perhaps you can use Google Earth to take a quick journey across the country or across the oceans to see where our soon-to-be new friends live!

~Mrs. Kriese and Mrs. Schoch