To highlight how communities change over time, I used Jeannie Baker’s story, Window. This wordless picture book served as an engaging hook to the topic. Before sharing the story, I gave pairs of students a page of the book. With their partner, students discussed what they saw in the picture. They then worked collaboratively as a class to put the pictures in an order. To accomplish this goal, they were required to share their observations and explore how their pictures connected.  This activity was the first time students were required to negotiate as a whole-class.  While I provided assistance to some students who were shy to share their ideas, the class became passionate about completing the task and were able to get 11 of the 13 images matched correctly. Following the collaborative activity, students shared their experiences, strategies, and challenges with the task. We used this discussion as a way to improve subsequent group activities.

After revealing the order of the story, I connected the activity to their local community. I showed the class a picture of their community in 1957 and an image from GoogleMaps of the same location today. We created a life-size Venn Diagram to compare the two images. During this activity, I was impressed by the critical thinking skills developing in the grade two students as they begin inquiring why communities change. We returned to the story to explore a potential answer to this question.