After sharing all of our African Animal Expertise and Artwork with our families at our PBL Celebration, we took some time to reflect on how well we had worked together as animal expert teams. Each group reviewed the group agreements they had written and then used our collaboration rubrics to assess how they did following directions, making and completing a plan, taking turns and doing their jobs (group roles). After assessing their work, groups reflected on ways that they worked well as a team and what things they could do even better next time to work together as a team.
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We measured, we drew, and we painted our life size animals! Next week, we are going to add the patterns to the animals, cut them out, and create the habitat. What a fun way to learn more about our animals! We can't wait to show you our African Savanna at the PBL showcase. Our class will be presenting
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- Be kind, safe and fair - Agree with our ideas - You raise your hand when you have questions or statments. - Keep your promises - Share your ideas | - work together - Make plans - listen - be kind - be careful | - work together - be kind, safe, and fair - Follow the group plan - Share - Dont put writing on top of other peoples - Be nice |
Turning Animal Facts into All About Books!
After setting the expectations, students will start generating questions they want to know about their animals and then work together to research these questions and write fact drafts for their books. Once groups have generated lots of fact page drafts and feel like experts, they will sort these facts into chapters. When we have all of the pages drafted, we will edit them for readability, marking them up with purple pens and making them sloppy before using them to write our final drafts and publish our books. This editing process will be an important step in creating our books. If we want other people to learn from our books, they have to be able to read our writing. This "research process" is something that we will keep going back to. Each group will be working at their own pace and will be at different points during the process from week to week. Such a fun and chaotic time that is full of great learning! |
We dove into working together as a team for one more "practice" project. Our task was to create a picture of the African Savannah. I love how all the Savannah's turned out so different! This was a great way to see everything they learned about the Savannah come alive. I heard comments like, "we need to add the acacia trees," "don't forget the waterhole," and "lets do one side the Savannah during the day and the other the Savannah at night since they are so different."
Once our Savannah's were complete, we assessed how well we thought we worked together as a team. This is a crucial step in furthering our learning around collaboration. We asked ourselves questions like what did we do well? what could we work on for next time?
Next week they will be given their expert groups and we will work together to find a role that best suits everyone's needs. I can't wait to start diving into researching those African Animals!
To help prepare for all the collaborative work students will be doing in their African Animal expert group, we did a mock group work activity with our literacy groups. We designed our very own animal with parts from other animals. The tricky part was that we each didn't get to make our own animal, we had to work together to design just ONE!
Ms. M, Ms. Ledford, and myself each had a group that we were helping facilitate. We introduced the idea of group roles and how even grown ups use roles like this to help them work together as a team. We worked together to think about each part of the animal and how we could come to a group agreement on what it should be. The captains took over calling on kids suggestions and deciding which strategy to use for coming to an agreement (voting, rock paper scissors, ect.) The recorders were hard at work drawing pictures and labeling on the group planning sheet. Material manager made sure that we had pencils, markers, and any other supplies we needed. The problem solver was ready to help with Kelso's choices if we had any arguments. Last, the organizer made sure our planning sheet got into our team folder and was safe and sound for the next day. Once the plan was made, it was now time to make our animal come to life. But how do you do that with 8 friends all trying to help and a blank sheet of paper? Time to make another PLAN! We had our roles to fall back on and didn't forget about how important it was to take turns while talking and while doing the work. In the end, each group had a drawing of their animal with labels for all of its parts. Each group got a chance to come up and do a mini-presentation of their made-up animal to the class. Whew! Hats of to Ms. M and Ms. Ledford for diving right in to teaching collaboration. Its not easy :) | |
" We learn together"
Our Spring project has a lot of learning opportunities, but I think the most valued in my mind is collaboration. So often we look at students as a unit of one trying to move forward and face academia on their own. One of our pillars is "we learn everywhere, we learn together." I see so much value in being able to work within a group of people that have different perspectives, different strengths, and different academic needs. I vividly remember those "group project days" when I came home so upset about the dynamics going on in my group. Now is the time to start building those skills around how we work towards a common goal with people that may be vastly different from us. There will be conflict, there will be some tears, but in the end we will learn the value of compromising and the value of realizing that my way may not always be the best way. I mention this because as we dive deeper into this Spring project, we need your support. Please follow the blog closely so that you can see what we are doing to strengthen our collaboration skills and potentially following up with some of it at home. Remember, true collaboration that comes from students working together and not the teacher telling them what to do can be a little messy at times. Trust the process :) We are setting up kindergarteners for their future PBL work at QAE and opening their eyes to the rich learning opportunities they have amongst their peers. We all have something to learn from each other.
Our first collaborative exercise was to complete a 100 pc Africa savanna puzzle. The beauty of working on collaborative skills is for students to figure out for themselves how they should go about completing the task. Instead of assigning them jobs and telling them to do the edges first, I just dumped the pieces on the floor and said "go." Sitting back and watching what happens next is where the real learning takes place. After about 5 minutes, I stopped them and asked "what is working well, what is not working so well." From those questions we then start to make a plan for how we are going to complete the puzzle. Here were some of their thoughts... Things to work on - it was too loud! - everyone was smushed - not everyone was participating - people were yelling |
Over several days our plan got more refined and we added different components as we went. Once day came up with having different groups of kids working on different parts of the puzzle (edges, elephant, giraffe, ect). They soon figured out what the challenge became that some animals overlapped each other and who was going to get what pieces became a problem. The next day they decided to just have an "edge" group and an "animal" group. The problem that came up was how to connect those two separate puzzles into one! Finally on Friday they stuck with their same plan of having an "edge" group and an "animal" group, but those two groups built their portion close together and both on the carpet so it was easy to push the pieces together. I tried to capture the messiness and awesome learning as best as I could :)
Next week we will try creating a collaborative made-up animal in a small group. Stay tuned!
Next week we will try creating a collaborative made-up animal in a small group. Stay tuned!
In preparation for our Spring PBL about African animals, we are diving into learning about life on the African Savanna. Last week, we created a KWL chart about Life on the African Savanna. On this chart, we recorded what we think we Know about this subject and what we Want to Learn about the subject. Over the next few weeks, we will read non-fiction books to answer the questions we want to know and then record what we have Learned. |
To start this learning,
I have been reading sections of the book "Facing the Lion: Growing up Maasai in the African Savannah" aloud to the kids. I will not read all parts of this book, but rather sections that will help the students develop an understanding of what childhood was like for the young nomadic cattle farmer who wrote it. I have only read a few chapters so far and it is fascinating to see how engaged the kids are in this text. It challenges them to make a movie in their mind about what is happening rather than relying on illustrations. We are learning a lot and have stated a web map to organize what we have learned. We just finished the chapter on school and were struck by some of the passages we heard:
“I was put right into 1st grade. The school was very simple. There were no chairs, no desks. The teacher had a blackboard, and we sat on the ground. The school day was long, starting at seven in the morning and running until four or five in the afternoon.”
“School was tough. Teachers expected a lot from us. They expected you to pay attention and work hard, and to sit still and not cause trouble.”
“We learned the same thing in school that children learned all over the world — reading, writing, and arithmetic.”
As we continue to read, we are capturing our learning using a web map. I am modeling this strategy for the students so that when they dive into learning about their African animal, they will have an idea of how to organize their learning and turn it into an All About book. If I were to do this for my web map444, all of the colored paper titles would be my chapter headings and all of the sticky notes would be fact sheets.
I have been reading sections of the book "Facing the Lion: Growing up Maasai in the African Savannah" aloud to the kids. I will not read all parts of this book, but rather sections that will help the students develop an understanding of what childhood was like for the young nomadic cattle farmer who wrote it. I have only read a few chapters so far and it is fascinating to see how engaged the kids are in this text. It challenges them to make a movie in their mind about what is happening rather than relying on illustrations. We are learning a lot and have stated a web map to organize what we have learned. We just finished the chapter on school and were struck by some of the passages we heard:
“I was put right into 1st grade. The school was very simple. There were no chairs, no desks. The teacher had a blackboard, and we sat on the ground. The school day was long, starting at seven in the morning and running until four or five in the afternoon.”
“School was tough. Teachers expected a lot from us. They expected you to pay attention and work hard, and to sit still and not cause trouble.”
“We learned the same thing in school that children learned all over the world — reading, writing, and arithmetic.”
As we continue to read, we are capturing our learning using a web map. I am modeling this strategy for the students so that when they dive into learning about their African animal, they will have an idea of how to organize their learning and turn it into an All About book. If I were to do this for my web map444, all of the colored paper titles would be my chapter headings and all of the sticky notes would be fact sheets.
Step #4 of our PBL project, "How can we use our creativity to help?" was to actually CREATE our idea that we came up with to help the world. We went back and reviewed our Educreation and Idea Planning Sheet to help us remember the details the 4th graders helped us add, then we were ready for our materials. THANK YOU to all who brought in materials! On the first day I took all the materials and spread it out in a line in the classroom and let them choose whatever they needed. The fun really began when I stepped back and watched them work. Without any support, they were cutting cardboard with scissors, sharing 3 rolls of tape amongst 25 kids who all needed it, molding wire to create electricity, and using paint to add details to their creation. I intentionally stepped back during the creation process, because clearly my creativity is far less than theirs. I didn't want to add my "logical" perspective into their creation and have it change their idea. I wanted their creation to be exactly how they thought. From the look of the final products, I think they look like exactly that, 100% kid creations. |
During the creation process, the creative energy in the room was amazing! I was able to capture a bit of the magic with these photos, but lots happened that I didn't get a chance to capture. Many students really enjoyed the long chunk of time that they were given to create, add on, and perfect their creations. Although, some students really struggled with this amount of time and how to use it without being given explicit instructions on what to do. The skill of seeing a problem, creating a plan, executing the plan, and adding onto it is what we are explicitly teaching though this process. for some students, this doesn't come naturally. To me, this is a life skill that I use EVERYDAY! Whether that is planning what I am going to do on a Saturday, figuring out what's for dinner, or deciding what to do when your car breaks down, it's up to me to solve that problem and I often go through a similar series of steps to get to the end product.
By the end of our fourth Idea Workshop today, most creators had finished turning their first idea into a final product and had made a video of their finished product with an explanation about how it helps. I will post these videos on students' e-folio PBL pages as they are completed. This project was simply a launch into a further investigation of how we can continue to use idea workshop to help. We will continue to have an Idea Workshop each Friday for the rest of the school year to continue and build on the skills of 1. Seeing a problem 2. Coming up with a plan on how to solve it 3. Deciding what materials you need and what the end product will look like 4. Making the idea come to life and creating it 5. Going back to add on, change, & modify based on you thoughts or feedback from others 6. Share your end product. |
Watch us grow as great thinkers and problem solvers!
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