I see, I think, I wonder...

Provocation and Follow-up

Our new unit is about trading. We are looking at what trade is, what people trade, how they trade, what happens if they have nothing to trade and what our responsibility is in that whole process...

We started by looking at Poverty. The provocation was a gallery walk of photos taken by my colleague when travelling around the world. The students were not given any front loading about the subject matter prior to this.

We used a See-Think-Wonder approach. Everyone had a bunch of slips with "I see, I think, I wonder" on each.

Image: Lindy Buckley

They saw, thought and wondered and then pinned the slip beside the photo.

Image: Lindy Buckley

After this quiet activity, we made small groups, each group to look at all the slips with a picture, to see if there were any common thoughts or wonderings. We also looked at the wonderings, doing a basic sort into questions that you could answer fairly quickly with yes or no and questions where you'd have to find out more to be able to try and answer. We talked about how much information you could get from an image. (Visual Literacy)

Image: Lindy Buckley

Killing two (actually more) birds with one stone, as it were, we went on to learn how to create a google presentation AND how to use Compfight to look for Creative Commons picures. Students chose 3 pictures from their search and placed on 3 slides, correctly attributed to the photographer.

They made notes about each image using the same See-Think-Wonder strategy. The next tech learning was using Quicktime with their google presentation, using their notes to talk about their pictures.

There's a lot of tech learning going on. At the same time I hear students talking with each other about the content of the images. Living in Indonesia, we all see images of poverty through our car windows on a daily basis. 

As we start investigating aspects of trade, we'll keep looking back at the poverty introduction to see if there are connections.

And HERE is how we created the presentation...

Warning! This is NOT a Presentation Zen!

Presentation Zen allows the presenter to use the images on a slide show as tools. The audience watches. The presenter talks. 

A Presentation Zen slideshow on its own has little meaning to the audience.

This slide show was created by me this morning after a lesson on the topic. I will send my students the link so they will have the shared doc in their Google Drives to refer to if they forget any steps of the process.

The Legacy of... "Legacies"

An inquiry unit called "Legacies" (first mentioned in this blog last year) has had its final inquiring.... We won't be studying history in this same way next year. 

As I have watched my students learning through this unit, I have been thinking about the aspects I don't want to lose, even though we will lose the unit.

Thinking about a strong introduction/provocation. See the link above.

Thinking about freedom of choice to choose an area of interest to study. How did we do this? Students browsed a variety of library books about times past from different places. They browsed websites on a LiveBinder, "So Many Legacies" . They wandered and wondered taking note of items, sites, stories that sparked their interest.

Thinking about what the unit is about and what it isn't about. I think this is so important. The boundaries, based on the standards and benchmarks, need to be clear.

Thinking about engagement. So important for the unit to IGNITE passion! Students want to be inquiring. They don't want to stop at breaktime! Some EVEN feel the need to dress the part before they start work each day....

Thinking about the Historical Fiction reading unit that runs along side the history and geography. We picked a different element each day and talked about it briefly before students read their chosen book from the historical fiction selection. Students met in Book Clubs and reflected on how that element appeared in their books.

Thinking about freedom to work with 1 partner, 2 partners or no partners... based on managing distractions. And no one chose to work alone.

Thinking about sharing the learning. Always great to watch and listen. That's when you know if students have succeeded.

 Images are all mine.

Student-Led Conferences 2013

In preparation for Student-Led Conferences at the end of this school year our grade 5s are moving towards using ePortfolios. Next year more classes will be heading in this direction. My school has adopted 4 Learning Dispositions: 
Resilience, Resourcefulness, Reflectiveness and Relating, based on Guy Claxton's work on Building Learning Power, so we will expect students to share their learning in light of those. 

We have a set of school Values too:

Perseverance, Integrity, Responsibility, Respect, Compassion, Balance and Fun. Students can talk about their learning through these lenses too.

This is a Slideshow used at a faculty meeting today. Presentation Zen, it isn't! But my colleagues said they found it useful.

Student-led Conferences 2013 from LindyBuckley

Spelling... Unit vocabulary... Creativity

A couple of weeks back, my class had spent half an hour gathering all the vocabulary to do with climate change which they considered important and had filled a couple of large pieces of paper. 

Last year in a similar activity, students had chosen words from the list to define and explain, by drawing, writing or using in a sentence or by giving examples. We did this again and pinned up a host of index cards. And then I wondered was there something more we could do with those words.

As it happens, that morning I had read the blog post, "Are you Creative?" by Sonya Terborg and I had also seen a tweet from @travisattis about Unfair Math Games.

So I gave a challenge:

Create a game to help your peers learn to spell these words or learn the meanings. 

I don't do this sort of thing often enough. I say this to myself every time I give such a task and see the excitement and enthusiasm that students display when totally engaged...

Some of the ideas:
Memory game with words on matching cards.
Memory cards with words in capitals on one card and lower case on the on the matching card. 
Memory game with words on one set of cards and definitions on another. 

A selected few words, with letters cut up. Object to try to make the words from the letters in a given time.

The most inventive used little whiteboards, marked with steps. Two people played. They were given a word and the first to explain the meaning got to move their token up the steps, counting the syllables of the word. 

After everyone had a chance to play, students reflected on their games. Some were able to suggest ways they'd modify the game having had people play. Some were able to see ways they could make their game more challenging.

But the question is.... who learned that vocabulary best? The game creators or the game players?

Photos are my own.

Space ...Final thoughts

This is, I think, the last post on this Cycles and Systems Unit.
Previous:
1. Tuning in to Space
2. Next Steps in Space
3. Do they Really Understand?

It is always hard when working one's way through a completely new unit to know how much time different parts will take. You can plan in detail and find that the plans are almost useless, since everything depends on what the students know and they what find out, BUT more importantly what understandings they acquire. Finding out stuff and actually understanding are not the same thing. And when researching (not just googling) is new, some things just take longer.

Our unit on Cycles and Systems was designed to address new standards and benchmarks our school has adopted. The focus according to the S&B was very clearly Space, the Solar System, Day and Night, Seasons...

STANDARDS & BENCHMARKS  [Learning Goals]

• Earth's rotation on its axis causes regular changes including day and night
• The Earth is part of a system of planets orbiting around a star (the sun)
• Observable changes occur in the sky and landscape

Because our students had done an almost similar unit in Grade 3, but had focused mainly on finding out about the planets in our Solar System, we decided to concentrate on the explanations of the various cycles, day and night, seasons, tides, etc. These, though part of that Grade 3 unit, were concepts too advanced for the average third grader.

In fact, explaining why we have seasons was challenging for quite a few fifth graders too! Most time in the unit was spent on reading about the cycles, discussing them, watching videos and making models. It occurred to us that quite a few of our students have always lived in the tropics and have not experienced living in places where there is a change of seasons. 

If, in the future, we have to include learning about the planets in our Solar System when the grade 3 classes who didn't do their Grade 3 Space unit arrive in Grade 5, we may find difficulty using a similar time frame.

In this unit this year, because of that repetition in Grade 3, we also asked the question, how have people's ideas and explanations about space changed over time. This does not link back to the S&B, but we felt it gave students a bit of perspective, understanding that we did not always know what we know now. My class had only 2 days to look at this aspect and we used our school's online databases as well as the NASA website and library books to study changes in scientific thinking from ancient civilizations and relatively recent changes in thinking in the European Middle Ages. In order to share our collected learnings, we used Google Presentation, with partners taking 1 or 2 slides each.

We do collaborations on Google docs fairly regularly. This was the first time that students were ALL able to do this without one or two messing with someone else's work! (Digital Citizenship lessons are working...) Earth's Place in Space.

At the closing of a unit, we will always ask students what new knowledge they found interesting. We ask what skills, they learned and found useful, or skills they improved on. We also ask how their thinking has changed. Here are a couple of reflections from students' blogs.

Next year, our students will also come with that grade 3 prior knowledge. But they will also come with more experience of inquiring. I am hoping that there will be less need to scaffold and there will be more opportunity for students to build their own inquiry. 

Plenty to talk about in our team unit discussion next week!

Photos are my own.

3. Do They Really Understand?

Continuing the reflecting on the unit: Cycles and Systems
(1. Tuning in to Space )
(2. Next Steps in Space )
 

After all the investigating, questioning, discussing, connecting, reflecting, drawing, reading, note-taking, writing, explaining, interpreting that my class has done on Cycles and Systems, I am still wondering..... do they really understand? How could we check this?

My colleague and next classroom neighbour, Peter came up with the following idea:

The connections between the earth’s cycles to its place in space are significant to life on earth

Think about how life on earth would be affected by each of these occurrences:

1.    Supposing the earth started moving further away from the moon...
2.    Supposing the earth started moving further away from the sun...
3.    Supposing the earth continued to orbit around the sun, but it stopped rotating...
4.    Supposing the earth continued to rotate, but it stopped orbiting the sun....

Take each one separately. Show your ideas, e.g. on a mind map. Make sure your notes are good enough to help you talk about your ideas in as much detail as you can, with examples of situations that might happen as a result of the change. 

What things would/might change, directly? (main branches of your mind map)
What things would/might change indirectly? (twigs off the main branches)

On the face of it these are challenging scenarios and you definitely have to understand what is happening in order to imagine a reverse situation. My students worked in pairs and had a fair go after some initial discussions together.

 Taking time to visit each others mind maps gave students the opportunity to ask questions and extend their thinking - which is a big part of what we want to do....
......extend the thinking....


Photos are mine.

Next Steps in Space... (Cycles and Systems)

Having identified the 'black holes' in student knowledge through the tuning in activities, students in my grade 5 class set about helping each other understand the the various cycles at work in the Solar System.

The hardest cycle for sure was the cycle of  seasons. Students used library books, atlases and websites, looking for descriptions, diagrams and models which helped make it clear. We watched some short videos. We collected and saved the videos and best websites in Symbaloo - which is a great curating tool!

Students collaborated in small groups and worked and reworked their explanations several times, using their own words to articulate what they were learning from the media they were using. They combined their oral explanation with modelling and diagrams. 

They blogged about their learning. (And practised adding Creative Commons pictures and hyperlinks at the same time.)

As we started to look at why and how those cycles affect life on earth, it was clear that the large amount of reading (both digital and print) and group discussions over the past few weeks have had a big impact on what students are now able to share with each other and with their teachers, compared with when we started this unit in December. These sorts of substantive conversations are vital, especially for English language learners.

Students listed ways that life on Earth is affected by the various cycles. They chose different aspects to investigate further.... and that's when we ran into our first hurdle!

Because these are new units, and we are developing them over this year and next, our library is not yet as well resourced as it will be. Yes, we do have heaps of books on the planets and Solar System because grade 3 used to study space. But looking at the effects of the cycles of the moon, earth, etc. requires making connections between "topics" such as animal/bird migration, hibernation, deciduous trees, religious festivals and what we have learned about the cycles.

And because making these connections is new to most students, a lot of scaffolding is needed. Hopefully as we continue to grow with our inquiry learning, these thinking strategies will be second nature.

After an extra library lesson to tighten up our search methods, my students seem to be ok, and everyone is busy finding information to demonstrate understanding of the connections made. And... I am thrilled to see, enthusiastically citing their sources in noodletools!

There's no doubt.... we are ALL learning!

Photos are my own.

Tuning In to Space (Cycles and Systems)

" Of all the planets in our solar system why is earth the best place to live?" 
This new unit, Space and Systems is the first that we have planned using our new "planner" and latest PD from Kath Murdoch in October. We have developed our own inquiry cycle, loosely UbD - but with a greater emphasis on Kath Murdoch's Inquiry Cycle since Kath is our visiting consultant helping us put everything in place.

In the past, our planners were pretty much all filled out before the unit started, except for student questions and action. 

Our new planner has our standards and benchmarks and a summary to start us off. We developed the Enduring Understanding and Essential Questions and listed the skills and knowledge that we are expecting students to acquire. We discussed and came up with the criteria that would be assessed to decide whether students were successful in their learning. 

We created a "compelling question" which acts as an overview of the whole unit. 

And we covered as much of the classroom walls as we could with black paper.

After that the next step was planning the Tuning In. Our school has just purchased the whole set of International Primary Curriculum units of work. Our school administration has hired many PYP and other inquiry teachers who are able to take the best bits of the IPC units and use them in a way that fits what we are doing. We didn't like the Entry Point in the unit "Space Explorers" but we did like the tuning in activities, what they call the Knowledge Harvest.


Instead we used Steve Box's idea of playing the Star Wars theme as our Entry Point. Students posted thinking and wondering on a pin board. 

Then, we used the IPC activity where groups had a set of cards with facts, some correct some incorrect, e.g "Astronauts can only fly to the moon when it is full," and "Revolve and rotate mean the same thing." They had to sort the cards into True, False and Not Sure, and then explain their thinking. The sets of cards can be rearranged as thinking changes duing the unit.

After that, students were given tasks ceveloped by team mate Peter Gibson:
They were asked to post their thinking on 3 walls in Wallwisher. They could read the other posts and re-post their ideas if they changed their minds. They could use whichever language they were most confident with.  On one Wall they were asked to make a list of all the planets in the Solar System. On another Wall they were asked to say what the term Solar System meant to them. They could also use black paper and chalks, pastels or cut paper to create a view of the Solar System. 

On another wall they were asked to comment on the compelling question.

Thnking from the class next door.

Following that, they were to read each other's comments, and then write a paragraph (or more) stating their point of view on a google doc. Last this was posted as a comment on my other blog which I have for class use. They could comment on the comments, (using our commenting guidelines).

Next day there was another Wall question. "What cycles are associated with Earth's place in space?" They were to choose a cycle with a partner and explain it to our 1st grade buddies next day. They had to make a quick plan of materials they would need to make models. Library books were to hand for checking accuracy of thinking. Even though this was originally a 3rd grade unit, I could see that these were misconceptions. It was important not to pass these on to the gr 1 buddies.

Do these activities give us evidence of understanding? We also had the students' individual blog posts.  

Interesting that the writer is evaluating the learning of the Grade 1 buddies!

And the Grade 1 tweets.

The next planning meeting will be to decide the next steps based on the prior knowledge we have discovered and the wonderings that have come out of our preliminary work. 

But now.....time for a holiday!

Checking Understanding

Checking often on the understanding is important before progressing to new tasks, either teacher directed or student directed.

After all the initial work on causes of hunger, we asked students what connections they could make between the causes of hunger. They did this in small groups. Listening to how students identified connections and explained their thinking was a clear indication of the levels of understanding they had reached (or hadn't!) Students helped each other when they asked questions for clarification. They had to think about what they'd learned so far. Students had to think of how to put what they'd said in writing to add to the chart.

The more I hear discussion and questioning and thinking out loud from my groups of students the better  I am able to decide when to have them start their own inquiries in our study area.

The substantive conversations that occurred during this collaboration are vital for our EAL students too. They learn new vocabulary. They hear it being used over and over and they get to practise using their new words and phrases as they all discuss their ideas.

Inquiry - Reading, Writing, Thinking...

Inquiry learning is not just the part of the day where you used to write Social Studies or Science on the timetable and you now write Inquiry! I always feel bothered when I see schedules where the week is filled with Maths, Reader's Workshop, Writer's Workshop, Spelling, various specialist subjects and then there's a couple of 45 minute blocks where Inquiry is fitted in.

For myself, when I am required to display a schedule, I have long blocked out times which I call Inquiry/Reading/Writing for want of a better label. When my students are working in a inquiry/project approach they are combining all elements of language. 

At any one time, students will be reading while others are writing or discussing, working alone or collaborating with a partner or two. They may be using books or their laptops or each other or teachers. They may be planning, asking questions, researching, gathering data or information, creating oral or visual presentations in a variety of formats and media or reflecting on the process.

(Of course there will be times when the reading and writing has nothing to do with the unit they are studying.....)

In their book, Comprehension and Collaboration, Inquiry Circles in Action, Stephanie Harvey and Harvey Daniels talk about inquiry workshop rather than Reading Workshop and Writing Workshop. I like this idea very much!

Even when we are in the stages of a unit where the study is more teacher directed, language arts are integrated with the science or social studies and the various skills are explicitly referred to.

Here's a couple of examples from our grade 5 team:
In our Feeding the Millions unit yesterday and today we have been looking at what hunger and malnutrition are. We discovered a most useful website for teachers from The Food and Agriculture Organisation,  Feeding Minds, Fighting Hunger, with some great lessons, which we have modified for our use. These have the same focus as our Enduring Understanding and some of our Essential Questions.

Lesson: What are Hunger and Malnutrition and Who are the Hungry?
In pairs, students used the sheet of information about food being essential to life and a list of foods that show the vitamins and minerals they provide.
The Task was to read together with a partner, discussing any difficult vocabulary, each on their own copy underlining with pencil, information he or she already knew and highlighting any information that was new.

Then, with the partner, they studied a drawing with a variety of foods in groups. This task was to see what foods they could identify and select some that would make a nutritious meal, based on the food information they'd read together.
The next part was looking for information from a world map provided by FAO which showed countries where 30% or more of the population are hungry or malnourished. They studied the map and used atlases  or online maps to name some of the countries with large percentages of hungry and malnourished people. 

They discussed why there was a large concentration in Africa and low concentrations in Europe and North America. This map was dated 2000, so they talked about how accurate that information was. Students searched the World Food Programme site (in the LiveBinder  Causes of Hunger and Malnutrition ) to find good recent information which they compared with the FAO map to see if any country's category had changed over 12 years.

Lesson: Causes of hunger 
One of our team put together 5 reports of causes of hunger, each with several short paragraphs. The paragraphs were cut up for a jigsaw activity. Each group of 4 students got a report to reassemble. Students had to think of a strategy to tackle the task. They needed to read the paragraphs and get the big idea behind each one. These notes they wrote in their books. 

They had to interpret the transition words at the beginning of the paragraphs to give clues as to placing them in order before sticking on a sheet.

Each group used their big ideas to present orally to the whole class the important points. After listening to everyone, groups were reformed to include one person from each of the first groupings so that the new groups could create a mind-map of the causes of hunger with detailed notes. 

Our EAL teacher was there also to work with a group who needed more assistance with the vocabulary.

Throughout, students were encouraged to write questions and wonderings down....

During all the different parts of these lessons, teacher modelling and student reflecting on how and why they are learning is also a major focus for our students.

Photos are my own.

Encouraging Compassion

Our new Unit of Inquiry is called Feeding the Millions. 

The Enduring Understanding is: 
Farmers grow enough food for the world’s population and yet many people suffer chronic hunger or malnutrition.
The Essential Questions are:
If the world's farmers produce enough food to feed the world, how come so many people are hungry?
What are the main causes of hunger?
How do people make money for food, when they have few resources and little education?
How can local communities (like Pasirmukti) increase food production?
How do NGOs help people in need?

We have studied this unit in its present format for four years now. In that time, Feeding the Millions has been the unit that has engaged students the most and has aroused more passion than any other. 

We start the unit by watching a movie called "Hungry is the Tiger" a documentary film in Bahasa Indonesia with English subtitles. There is a travelling dhalang who tells a series of stories to children in a kampung in the country with wayang (shadow puppets). Each little story is followed by a look at aspects of hunger, malnutrition, farming and self-sufficiency in communities in rural Indonesian.  Part of the documentary is filmed in India also. Our children are enthralled by the experience. It's a wonderful hook of a film! (A school alumnus was involved in the production, gave us a copy and introduced the film to our students four years ago before it had its official premiere!)

As part of the unit there is a field trip where our students go to stay on a working farm at Pasirmukti seeing food production first hand and taking part in farming activities. We ask them to make connections with what they have seen in the film. They have another field trip to Kampung Kids, an organisation where children can have early years education but more importantly a nutritious meal once a day. Some local older children are sponsored by the organisation to attend the local school.

Feeding the Millions is a unit which requires students to really reflect on their own lives while they look at the lives of those less fortunate than themselves, often the people they see from their car windows as they are driven from place to place by their drivers. It is especially interesting for our students, who are for the most part expatriate or wealthy indonesians, all well-off compared with the majority of the population living around them. 

Some of our students are amazed that there are children living so close to them who don't go to school because their families can't afford for them to go. Some of our students bring great prior knowledge coming from families where mum or dad works for an NGO or Aid agency.

As well as looking at hunger and malnutrition locally, we have a decent quantity of great library books about feeding the world and websites gathered in a LiveBinder, Feeding the Millions - What's it all about? 

So many ways to provoke wondering and questioning.... and finally the action that comes from students themselves. This is what we most want to see in the service-learning area of our curriculum.

We've seen how engaged this unit is for kids and now we are seeing the research which explains what we've recognised. It's nice to read why this type of unit ignites such passion in our children. As a faculty we have watched videos of Mary Helen Immordino-Yang talking about her studies. 

And as it happens I just read an article last night called Three Insights from the Cutting Edge of Compassion Research by Emiliana R. Simon Thomas of the Greater Good Science Center, based at University of California, Berkeley, which talks about compassion and mindfulness. 

Compassion is one of our School Values. In this unit there is plenty of opportunity to encourage it. 

"Hungry is the Tiger"
Produser Eksekutif: Hashim Djojohadikusumo
Dibawakan oleh: Sudjiwo Tedjo dan Christine Hakim
Menampilkan: Prabowo Subianto Djojohadikusumo
Disutradarai oleh: Gary Hayes
Diproduksi oleh: PT. Media Desa Indonesia

Essential Questions

In a recent post, When a Unit Doesn't Go So Well..., I listed thoughts that were going through my mind about what reasons there might have been. I've been thinking about those on and off over the past week as we start our new unit. Our cross campus team debrief/reflection for the learning to learn unit is still a couple of weeks away.

It occurred to me that I didn't add the Essential Questions to my list of possible reasons why I felt the unit didn't go so well. Maybe they weren't engaging enough. Maybe they didn't point in a clear enough direction for thinking about answers.  So I looked again at the questions that our team decided on at our meeting way back in April.

Essential questions should be essential. 1. How does my brain work? - Is it essential that a 10 year old knows how the brain works?  The way it's written, I think that is way too big a question for grade 5 -  people spend years trying to find out. We only have a couple of weeks!

2. What does my brain have to do with learning? I know what we were aiming for but it's not a wildly exciting question....

3. What can I do to get the best out of my brain? It already got tweaked at our first planning meeting of this year. This is more along the lines of what we're wanting students to get from this unit.

4. What are my responsibilities as a learner? It's OK but it doesn't grab you! And maybe it is redundant if Q3 is really well understood by students. It IS what we want students to be thinking about.....

So now I'm wondering if we can do better... Below are my thoughts today which I'll share with my small campus team and see if we can improve on the originals. And then we'll share cross campus. A small group feeding off each other's suggestions is the way to go to get the best questions, I think. Wordsmithing is vital, too.

How can I show how amazing my brain is? - I like the word amazing. It does presumes our brains are amazing - but I think for grade 5s that's probably OK.

How amazing is my brain?  - I like this better
How awesome is my brain?

How can I change my lifestyle to help my brain work best? - Hmmm...

How can I make myself smarter? - This sounds good. I like "smarter."

What habits do smart people have? - Have to think. Could be good. How would students go about finding out? Would that be too hard...?

Can I make myself smarter? How? - Yes or no answer, but it does have a "How" so that's OK...

If you read this and have suggestions please let me know!

Photo is my own.

Asleep with my eyes open...

In helping students with the third EQ of our Learning to Learn Unit, "How do I get the best out of my brain," our EAL teacher Mrs Bell read a story called Moody Cow Meditates by  Kerry Lee McLean.  In the story the main character learns to manage his anger.

Margaret then had students practise an exercise that they could use to help them do the same.

She used a jar of sparkles suspended in a solution of half water and half hand sanitiser (as we can't easily buy glycerine). She created a jar with the children so they could see it and make their own if they liked. She had gold and silver glitter as well as colours which children suggested for anger (red) and sadness (blue).

She had them sit comfortably on the floor, sounded a little gong and shook the jar. Children had to concentrate and be very aware of their breathing and watch the sparkles in the jar settle to the bottom. She played the gong again and had them sit without talking until they could no longer hear it. 

After this exercise which lasted only a few minutes, she asked how they felt.

Here are some more responses:

• Why does this thing make me calm?  And I felt that I was in no-where
• When I heard the gong, it made me slow down my thoughts and I could control myself better
• It helps me feel calm and also my body feels really relaxed and calm, it also gets all my bad thoughts.
• It makes me feel calm and tired. It just makes me forget all my thoughts and think all about glitter.  It could help me in the beginning of the day. It helps me clear my mind.
• I didn’t notice or remember anything, I thought I fell asleep with my eyes open.
• I think this is good because it helps controlling you and you have a clear mind and it makes you calm
• It was helpful because my mind just calmed down about thinking 100 different things.
• It gave me relaxation and it is a little bit helpful for me at home because of my brother.
• It helps me because all my stress was gone and I didn’t feel a thing.

Photos are my own.