To continue our initial launch of the final unit, each of our seven grade three teachers hosted a Tuning In learning experience last Friday morning. Classes spent fifteen minutes in each room, noticing and wondering about different aspects of our Communication Systems unit.
The kids came back buzzing about their ideas and questions, and I hope we'll host more of these next year!
We're starting our final unit of inquiry for the year: Communication Systems. Before our April break, we were lucky enough to attend our PTA Cultural Show, which showcased a dozen countries with countless talented performers. To begin tuning in to the unit, we made a quick mind map based on what the noticed during the show:
I took a quick snap of the map and printed it out for the kids to categorize the ideas. We didn't even brainstorm the categories, but the kids did a phenomenal job of classifying terms using their own ideas and understandings:
We haven't done a lot, really, but set the stage for understanding when it's all done. The kids made sense of the commonality by choosing a sentence and putting it in their own words - and not just by replacing words with synonyms, but by finding the essence of the text and truly understanding. They've determined that our unit will be about the messages we share and the ways we communicate these messages.
From here, we pulled out some key vocabulary and ideas so that we could search our library for books related to Communication Systems. We checked them all out and spent some time browsing the many different books they found: everything from fables/folktales, the history of music, colours, and culture to symbols, signs, languages, and hieroglyphics. They came up with categories of personal interest and we taped sign-up sheets to the board so kids could decide what they're most interested in learning about. This was great because it gives me, as the teacher, a jumping off point with immediate engagement and sets us up for later independent inquiry. I'm sure these lists will be ever-changing!
This is a question I posed to my class a few days ago.
It sits among evidence of our inquiry learning about Connections to the Natural World, with emphasis on energy sources and human impact on the earth.
The kids had some really interesting responses, ranging from reflections on themselves as researchers to specific content they've learned to generalizations about research itself.
For example:
I learned that the internet can be really frustrating.
There's lots of ways to research.
I learned that solar energy uses turbines, too, not just hydro.
Print resources are sometimes easier to find information in.
The great thing is that this can be adapted in so many ways!
What have you learned most recently ...
as a mathematician?
as a friend?
as a writer?
as a scientist?
at home?
from someone else?
Using this question frame, we've started examining our reading habits and interests, reflecting on what we've learned most recently as readers.
I'll post more on that soon, as there have been some really rich conversations in our room lately.
Early last week, I posed the question to the class, “What is a story?” This led to some really interesting discussion and wonderings. After some whole-class talk, one of my girls stopped everyone when she asked, “Are non-fiction books still important since we have the Internet now?” The room was abuzz as they all started talking at once about their opinions, which set up a lovely inquiry for the remainder of the lesson.
Students chose a side and started completing a persuasive writing graphic organizer to get their arguments and reasoning in order. (This had been introduced the week prior, so it was fresh in their minds.)
The next day, students were introduced to the persuasive essay format, complete with well-written paragraphs and transition words. Pairs then used their graphic organizer to inform their essays, and these are beautifully written pieces!
Our next step will for students to present their arguments to the class or in small groups - we haven't figured that one out yet.
This was such a great way for my kids to practice communicating, reasoning with logic, writing supporting details, and focusing on persuasion. I never mind when my "plans" get derailed by a student comment or question - that's the beauty of inquiry to me!
For our performance task in our Physical Well-being unit, I simply printed the standards and indicators being addressed on half sheets of paper, had the kids describe each in their own words, and add a picture for understanding. It was pretty cool listening in on conversations that were had as cards were finished and students began organizing them for Emerging, Developing, and Proficient learners! I highly recommend this as an end-of-unit learning experience:
This week in Math class I introduced a new Visible Thinking routine, the Think Puzzle Explore. It was perfect and I felt SO energized afterward! When we first starting talking, the kids, knowing that "Math" was on the schedule and hearing that "visible thinking" was a big part of the day's plan (like that's any different from any of the learning we show in class?), asked plainly, "How are we going to do Visible Thinking in Math?!" To which I could only reply, "Don't we do that everyday in Math? Isn't a big part of what we do in addressing problems and tasks to explain our thinking, put the processes our brains go through on the page for others to see and understand?" A resounding: Ah. Yes, Mrs. Phillips. Our big topic right now is multiplication, and we're really just starting out, with kids at very different levels. The routine looks like this: Think: What do you think you know about the topic/idea? Puzzle: What are you confused about? What are your puzzles, wonderings, or questions about [multiplication]? Explore: How can you explore this further? The kids got cozy around the room and spent a good 30 minutes (after the settling in that comes with the week-before-a-much-needed-holiday) just thinking on the Think and writing down their prior knowledge and understandings. We gathered then, to discuss what the kids think they know. I typed out their responses as we went to make the thinking actually visible. Next, the kids got cozy again to address their puzzles. Again, gathering to discuss with documentation. So now, on our "math board," we have a class set of thoughts and a class set of puzzles.
In our room this was the perfect way to get kids interested in a personal math inquiry - particularly in a topic with which they are beginning to feel comfortable (thank you, grade 2 teachers!), but are still scared to delve totally in to (I need to know all the facts fluently up to 10?!). We are exploring everything from the different strategies we can use to solve multiplication equations to the invention of multiplication to the various ways to practice personal facts fluency. After our October break (off to Boracay with baby and in-laws!) we'll do some exploring and sharing of our new learning.
I was inspired one weekend when my husband set out money for our helper's weekly trip to the grocery store. She has off-the-charts mental math skills, and from the 2000 pesos (about $50), she spends almost every last cent to buy the food she needs to cook our lunches for Tuesday - Friday. (How seriously lucky are we that this something we have in our lives?!) Then I thought: this must go into the classroom. It's the perfect link with our Physical Wellbeing commonality. So I set it up with the kids, telling them about Angie, and we figured out together how much she probably spends each day. The kids used very intelligent reasoning, saying that some days, when she makes us soup, it probably costs her less than when she makes us chicken with a salad. I mean, come on...! Well done, grade three. Then we talked about how difficult it is to eat healthy everyday. We talked about advertising and how it's literally all around us, trying to persuade us to buy every sugar-filled and "low fat" and cartoon-laden product out there. From here, we inquired into what makes a balanced meal? The kids hit the Chromebooks, iPads, and our library, searching for information. After about an hour, we came together and discussed our findings. We even qualified the terms "good" and "bad" with reference to food. Someone hit on "the five food groups" and we were off... The next day I shared with them a Google Doc called "The Legends Supermarket," modeled after our class name, that was blank. The kids organized themselves into food group companies, browsed Compfight and CC Search for images of foods, and began adding them to the Doc to create a grocery flyer.
You can see some groups have even started adding in prices...that I've spent some time adjusting today! 10 pesos for a whole chicken? Okay.
After pricing is made more appropriate (!), the kids will use the shared folder to build their own healthy meal for one lunch, with 250 (fake) pesos in their pockets. We've discussed the goal, which is to practice our 2- and 3-digit addition skills.
I'm really looking forward to getting back to this next week! Real life, meaningful, and integrated.
We're just beginning our new Unit of Inquiry, Communication Systems. As a grade level team, we've decided to put a big emphasis on the five semiotic systems - linguistic, auditory, visual, spatial, and gestural - along with a look at cultural expression.
Rather than explicitly teaching each one, I'm going to be introducing my students to each system by immersing them in it to help them better understand what these big ideas mean.
First up, the auditory system, all about music and sound effects. A great streaming website for this activity is The Silk Road Project:
If you click Music & Artists, then Listen to Music, you can access a variety of interesting music from around the world.
As a class we listened to one song.
I stopped the playback to ask a few questions:
How does the piece make you feel?
What images come to mind?
Where in the world might this music be from? What makes you say that?
Then we listened again with the questions in mind and discussed afterward.
For the visible thinking routine, I passed out our Inquiry books and had the kids write the title 10x2.
I put on a new song and again, we just listened.
Before we listened a second time, I explained the 10x2 routine: basically the kids try to write down ten words or phrases that come to mind while listening. (This is then repeated after another listen; the x2.)
We had such rich discussion afterward.
When I asked them what they thought the communication system might be all about, they were pretty much bang on: music, singing, cultural songs to communicate, expressing something without words, listening, tune.
Every Wednesday morning we have a late start at school - the kids come in at 8:30 instead of 7:45 and our ES faculty meets together for some PD. It's pretty great and keeps everyone involved in the learning process. A few weeks ago, one part of our PD was to take a walk around the school and note examples of inquiry in other classrooms. How often do you think to just walk through another teacher's classroom? Just to see what's up, what's been happening? Do you feel comfortable doing so? With seven grade three classrooms, I'm lucky because I get to see quite a lot just bouncing around in the grade level. It was such a great experience to open up all the doors so we could browse around all classes from Pre-K to grade 4. Walk-throughs are something that our elementary school is trying to implement as an open form of communication, investigation, and professional inquiry, and I LOVE it! Here are just a few of the inspiring ideas I saw around:
This display uses cover images of picture books the class used to explore Measurement, with a list of student-written measurement tools below.
A simple but inquiry-focused graphic organizer - for anything! Nothing says inquiry like question starts.
One of our Transdisciplinary Skills displayed with the ActivBoard web from class discussion. You can't really see it, but the kids all added an index-card reflecting on a time when they successfully used Connection and Collaboration in their own lives.
Totally want to make this for my room. Reflection is such a difficult skill, but is so important, and this is a great way to help students frame their thinking.
Mathematical Practices posted with student-generated definitions/understanding below.
Project to show personal inquiry into How-To/Sequence writing. This is a great way for students to really separate the steps of the process visually.
Love the idea of taking big questions the kids have asked ("When did you start to think?" "What is the difference between the truth and a lie?" "What is imagination?") that maybe don't fit in nicely with any of your curriculum content and making them meaningful.
Students address one of this unit's Essential Questions.
Using a See Think Wonder routine to help students inquire into a graph they find personally interesting.
Again - great reflection tool. I'm thinking I should make goal-setting/reflection my professional goal for next school year!
Today we got to see some of the amazing work completed by our High School Robotics classes. There were so many cool things to see - from a hover craft to a fire-throwing robot! Our school has amazing educational opportunities and nurtures some true talent.
Before we headed down, I asked the class to work on a Thinking Routine to inquire more deeply into the topic of Robots. This time we used a digital Think Puzzle Explore routine. The first part, Think, is just that - students thought about what they already know about robots and typed it into a Google Drawing I had shared. In the Puzzle section, they wrote down any puzzles or questions they had about robots. After they got a few questions typed up, I emailed them the link to visit the school's Robolucion blog (full of videos, pictures, and write-ups about the various robotic inventions we would see). From there, they formulated more puzzles - questions they could ask the inventors directly! We then went to the exhibit, Explored, and the class typed up what they found interesting about the display. The whole process led to some great discussion.
Here's just a quick look at some work they shared back with me:
As an "exit slip," they had to write one of their reflections on the board to really make this routine visible in the classroom:
This is a really simple but powerfully thought-provoking routine that can work with any "topic" you choose. The kids were totally engaged... and I was not expecting that on this Friday morning after our long week! And at that, Happy Friday, all! Well-deserved, I'm sure.
Yep, it’s true. After finding a cockroach in our classroom yesterday, students were having all kinds of interesting conversations (and reactions!) about our gross little friend. After some observation, the poor guy was eventually killed. I was really tuned into their conversations - comments ranged from "It's so gross!" to "Why did we have to kill such an innocent creature?" to "Ew ew ew ew ew. Ew!" (Alright, so that last one might have been me...)
Well, thanks to Wonderopolis and their timely daily wondering (sent straight to my inbox), it turns out that if you find one in your “house,” it really is best to get rid of it! (Not that that necessarily means killing it, but no one was exactly brave enough to pick it up and carry it out…)
So today, we inquired into cockroaches. Two words: totally engaged. We started a Harvard Visible Thinking routine called“Connect-Extend-Challenge” to track our thoughts. The students first shared and then wrote about or diagrammed their connections – prior knowledge, stories, experience, feelings, and reactions to cockroaches. [For the parent blog we keep, I took videos of some kids sharing their thoughts at each stage of the Connect-Extend-Challenge, which was the perfect way to really make thinking visible!]
and then used some information from Wonderopolis to learn more about the pesky little cockroach. This article was great because it also loosely connected with our inquiry into energy, as it’s titled“Could a Cockroach Survive A Nuclear War?” We read it together and students wrote some ways their thinking had beenextendedby the new information: What have you learned? What is really interesting to you? How has your thinking changed or been extended?
We then discussed some of the crazy info: “They’ll eat anything! Even soap…”; “They can hold their breath underwater for thirty minutes!”; “They can live for up to six weeks without a meal!” [What?! I can hardly go an hour these days!] After, students wrote down questions that were still challenging their thinking or understanding about cockroaches: What new wonderings came up? How can you learn more about cockroaches? I was quite surprised to hear students who thought cockroaches were simply disgusting in the beginning, really marveling over just how amazing these resilient little creatures are!
So there you have it – our inquiry into, that’s right, cockroaches! The class did a pretty great job making connections, extending their thinking, and then challenging their understanding of this all-too-familiar Manila staple. [They still freak me out.]
I've just started Harvard's Making Thinking Visible course online as part of our Professional Development program here at ISM. I'm really excited about learning some new strategies. We've actually used several visible thinking strategies in the classroom already, as I've had the book checked out from our library all year (because I'm a book hog...shhh):
Today I thought we'd do another See-Think-Wonder with the goal of having students recognize some connections between their prior and acquired knowledge with our inquiry into energy. I added a Connect box to the activity to help students get there, so it didn't seem so superficial. I made up 7 posters with images related to energy in the center
and sections around the image labelled "I see... I think... I wonder... I connect..." (not so easy to see as I just used a class iPad to get photos this morning).
We revisited the See-Think-Wonder format on the Activ Board by discussing synonyms and sentence starters for each term so I could (hopefully) help students get to some deeper thinking when they set off and give my ELL friends some vocabulary to use:
(let me tell you, some of this was like pulling teeth...)
and then we did an example together:
Clearly, we have some work to do ("I see colours" ???).
Then the kids roamed around for fifteen-twenty minutes to add their thoughts/comments/questions to each poster.
As I circulated to hear the students talking about the images (and various other things, like cats, recess, Pixel Gun, dance parties, "songs that are awesome".... that's a regular morning, right? So much for accountable talk!) and read some of their comments, it was amazing to recognize the different levels within my room. It was something like this:
"I saw a rainbow once." (Okaaay, I guess it is a connection...) "This looks like coal, which is a fossil fuel and that's bad :(" (Now we're talking!) "What if the picture is upside down?" (Um... hmm. Relevant?) "I noticed that this is hydro energy and that's connected to our energy inquiry!" (Hurray!) "My connection is that [the electrical wires] looks like a cat because you can sort of see ears." (I know, deep.)
Afterward we shared as a whole group, which is when the discussion started to get so much better and the beauty of See-Think-Wonder began to come alive. It's pretty great when a comment like, "I see a white car" can turn into discussion about the type of fuel the car uses and whether the owner could use a biomass source, like corn, if it's available. True story - that conversation happened!
As our inquiry into energy unfolds, the kids have jumped deep into learning about various renewable and non-renewable energy sources. Today, I shared with them this book, which is a great mentor-text based on a true story:
It's all about the Danish island of Samso and their pursuit of energy independence: from a big idea to the persuasion of the population to the implementation of major energy-reduction technologies. The author does a great job of bringing these big ideas down to the kid's level to explain how the island now uses solar, wind, and biomass energy to power their communities - producing more energy than they are consuming! They've changed their ways, abandoning the use of fossil fuels, when the rest of the world seems to think this is only a dream. It just goes to show: big changes could happen!
Afterward we watched these videos and the class was Amazed to realize Samso really is an actual place in the world!
We're getting into the thick of our latest Inquiry focus, all about types of energy. All of the teachers on my team have chosen one type of energy to teach and we're setting up rotation lessons for the classes. With seven of us, this could take awhile...! But I love the idea of sharing the teaching and getting to know some of the other kids in the hallway. For my energy type, I'm teaching about biomass as a renewable source. Because some classes can only come in for a 45-minute block, I've started each lesson off with a really cool experiment involving biomass energy at work. Basically, I put this slide on the ActivBoard and let the kids get to work:
Note: I handled the warm water part as it had to come from a kettle.
We let that work away as we discussed the energy sources in these pictures:
This led to some great discussion. But then I asked if they knew that things like cow poo, bananas, sewer water, and corn could produce electricity. A lot of them looked at me like I'm crazy. We talked about what these things have in common and were able to come up with a definition for biomass.
Biomass is any material made by plants or animals that we can convert into energy.
Next, their attention was quickly drawn to the experiments they had left sitting on the windowsill, and what we saw was this:
So cool! We talked about our observations, reviewed our predictions/hypotheses, and came to the conclusion that the materials inside reacted together to create a gas. Pretty smart, these third graders!
Once we decided that the living creature in the bottle was indeed the yeast, I set it up for them as if the yeast was going through a morning routine, not unlike the routines we all might go through. When we're just looking at a little yeast granule, he does not look alive - in fact he's asleep. To wake him up, we put him in a soothing warm water shower. And how do we all feel after first waking up in the morning? Hungry! Just like our yeast. So we give him a little breakfast of sugar, and as he starts munching away, he begins to burp, letting out little bits of C02 gas, just as we do when we exhale. The kids quickly concluded that it's this carbon dioxide that rose up in the bottle to inflate the balloon. (PS - These little C02 burps are the same reason we have little air pockets in our bread!)
To show the kids some ways that biomass is actually being used throughout the world, I put an iPad at each table team with instructions to find a certain video and they rotated to watch some different examples:
As they watched, I asked the groups to be thinking about the pros and cons of biomass energy. When they thought of one, they added it to a whole-class T-chart:
By the end of the rotations, this board was Filled!
This was a good way to continue discussion about biomass energy and for eventually comparing various forms of energy. When my class had learned about geothermal energy with another teacher, we asked them to "lay it on the line" by choosing whether they thought geothermal or biomass was the most sustainable choice for energy use. (This is a great Visible Thinking routine called Tug of War.) They moved to the designated side of the room and voila, we had a great tool for debate!
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