New blog for my grade 6 exhibition students

I created a new blog for the students whom I am mentoring for this years PYP exhibition.

Please check it out and see how it can be improved. I hope to teach them how to express themselves by using web 2.0 tools. Most of them are eager but a little unsure. Let's see how it goes!

What fun! :)
http://akamexhibition2011.blogspot.com/

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Classification -Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 1)

In this series, we will discuss how we can design lessons for conceptual understanding. Having recently completed an upskilling course with IB, I felt we may all benefit from looking at some of these strategies and how they might look like in our PYP classrooms. Strategy 1: Classification Source: Ibo.org In this post, I will be focusing on the research-backed strategy, "classification". Chadwick (2009) highlights that classification helps develop conceptual understanding by allowing students to organize information, recognize patterns, and understand relationships among concepts. Here are some examples across several disciplines on how I have used tools to classify. Math Class 1) In my math class (Grade 3) instead of having students simply rote learn the names of the shapes and their properties, have them sort the shapes based on the number of sides, angles and symmetry. Even better, use the Concept Attainment Strategy (I keep returning to this strategy be...

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