EUGENE, Oregon - Inspiring young children to draw monster faces isn't hard. Just read them Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are or William Steig's Shrek, and then turn them loose with crayons and paper.

That's just the first step in a lively language arts project unfolding in Patricia "Bobbie" Reed's blended first- and second-grade class at Harris Elementary School. Reed and her students are participating in an international project that combines art, literacy, and technology to connect Oregon students with a partner classroom in Australia.

The project blends creativity with cross-cultural awareness

Reed discovered the project through the GlobalSchoolNet Foundation*, which maintains a listserv site called Hilites. Drawing on her 20 years of experience with primary students, and with a special interest in cross-cultural teaching opportunities, Reed knew this project sounded like a winner.

Reed explains how it works. "When your class participates in the Monster Swap, each kid in the class draws a monster, writes or dictates a paragraph describing it in detail, sends the description (but not the picture) to another participating class, and kids on that end try to reproduce the drawing from the description." Students on the other end send along their own descriptions, too. "For the last bit of fun, the pictures are swapped (scanned or digital pictures sent by e-mail), and kids get to see how language translates into art."

Reed encouraged her students to be creative. "We talked about the pictures we had in our minds about monsters we knew, then I challenged students to draw a monster that no one else had ever imagined. They delivered with zeal," she says, "and drew amazing, terrible monsters (well, a few were friendly)."

The next step proved more challenging. "Children at this age have typically written in the narrative (story) mode, so a lesson in descriptive writing was in order." She explained that a good description "puts a picture in the reader's mind." That discussion gave her a chance to weave in lessons on relative language (such as the use of "bigger than" or "smaller than"), and similes and metaphors (such as "it looks like" or "it reminds me of").

Reed was hopeful as she watched her young monster-makers get to work, but their first pass at descriptive writing "was a disaster," Reed admits. "Being a conscientious sort, I went at it again." She read aloud one of the student's drafts, and asked the class to draw what they had heard. "They learned that it's awfully hard to draw a picture of a monster knowing only what its name is and what it eats." They revisited the idea of "putting pictures in people's minds," and students went at it again, "this time with great success." Reed was especially pleased to see students describing their monsters using geometric terms they'd been studying in math.

Next, students e-mailed their Australian partners the completed descriptions, and the partners replied with their own passages. Reed and the Australian teacher have exchanged digital photos of the drawings, so students can see how close they've come to replicating their partner's original artwork.

Although the project offers powerful lessons in language arts, that's just the starting point for learning opportunities. Reed's students, for instance, have learned that "other little kids live in different parts of the world—real kids we can communicate with." They thought Australia seemed very far away. "But then they noticed we share the Pacific Ocean, and it suddenly seemed much closer." Oregon students worried that their partners' descriptions would arrive in a foreign language. ("Doesn't every foreign country speak a foreign language?") When Reed explained that Australians speak English, they wanted to know why. "Then they started to muse, well, why do Americans speak English?" That led to a quick lesson on the colonization of the United States and Australia's start as a penal colony.

Science lessons came into play when Oregon students learned that their counterparts were preparing for winter holiday—right in the middle of April. "This led to a lesson on hemispheres, seasons, and climates."

More questions have provided chances to explain the metric system and other differences from country to country. "Just now, students are having to use the other side of the tape measure, and are coming to terms with the fact that 'color' can be spelled 'colour' and not be wrong," Reed adds.

For a more detailed look at the lesson plans and resources for "Monster Swap" see the unit plan, http://educate.intel.com/en/ProjectDesign/UnitPlanIndex/MonsterSwap/.