One of our 6th grade standards requires students to analyze how an author uses point of view. Before I can even think of having my students actually analyze an author’s point of view (and more specifically, a character’s perspective), I always try to arm them with some background knowledge and first-hand experience. I decided to allow my students to use googly eyes to eyebomb inanimate objects and write a short story in the point of view of their choice. After winter break  the plan is to then kick it up several notches and focus on perspective when reading literature. If you’re not to sure about how perspective and point of view are different, then please read this blog post by Dr. Roz Linder.

First, I used EDPuzzle and a video from Flocabulary (this video was a hit!). Then, students took notes in their interactive notebooks, they reviewed definitions on Quizlet, and students reviewed examples from various children’s books, manuals, essays, and short stories. After that, we had some guided and independent practice using some worksheets I got from ereadingworksheets.

Before students got their googly eyes, they had to score a 90% or higher on a short quiz. Students were also required to look at examples and review the eyebombing website and video. Students were assigned iPads, and It took them about 10 minutes to roam the school to snap photos. They came back to class and began prewriting. The blogs posts are almost finished and they are awesome! This took about two days to complete. We covered point of view right before winter break, so when students get back after break we’ll review POV and then jump up to perspective.

I’m reading over some of the blog posts now, and I’ll write another blog post after I’m done grading. We’ll also be covering sentence structure for the next two weeks, so I will have students look over their stories to see how they can revise them using their knew sentence structure knowledge. Once I  teach about perspective, I think I’d like to have them read each other’s blog post and focus on the perspective of the eyebombed objects.

Tech I Used:

Chromebooks/iPads: I have a classroom set of Chromebooks, but iPads are shared at our school site. Students used the Chromebooks for the classwork, and the iPads were used to take pictures. The pictures were uploaded to Google Drive.

Google Classroom: All links and multimedia text sets were housed in Google Classroom.

EdPuzzle: I put the Flocabulary video on EdPuzzle. I didn’t add any questions because students had to fill out the lyrics to the song.

Quizlet: I use Quizlet for vocabulary, and my students love using Quizlet Live!

Google Forms: Google Forms was used for the quiz.

KidBlog: Students write their blog posts on KidBlog.

Update: Check out this POV Hyperdoc! Great minds think alike; this document also includes

Things I Learned:

• Third-person POV seemed to be very tricky for all students; we’ll need more practice identifying the different types of third-person POV.
• My students need extra help with dialogue! As I was reading blog posts, I noticed missing quotation marks or quotation marks in the wrong place.
• Kids LOVE googly eyes! They loved the various options I had, so I’m glad I got different sizes (and some with eyelashes!).
• This was an assignment ALL of my students could do! I have five newcomer students from Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras and they were all so excited to participate. They wrote their stories in Spanish and used Google Translate to translate the story into English. They will be working with a partner to edit and revise their work.