Summative assessment- Unit of Inquiry: Star Trekkers

Learning about space always excites my grade 4 students. They are curious and have such a vivid imagination! However, the unit does not allow scope for much inquiry. The knowledge is out there and they basically need to identify and sort information. We came up with the idea of creating a board game for the summative assessment.They had to use their knowledge of space and invent a game with an instructional manual. The results were amazing. Ride on a comet and zoom to the desired destination; get sucked into a black hole; hitch a ride on Voyager...
Spinners, based on their recent Maths topic "Probability" were ingeniously used. My colleague and I were delighted by the results. Unfortunately I am having loads of problems uploading videos on the blog. The excitement, the buzz was quiet obvious there.

What I liked about the lesson was that it was not planned. The students had to invent their own rules and figure out what works or doesn't work. They realized they HAD to edit their manuals in order to answer their peers' queries and take into account the fairness of things.

A few days after this lesson, I came across John Hunter's video on his board game. Wow!

Mr Hunter refers to San Tzu's "The Art of War"

Click on the link to download the book: The Art of War

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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...

Generalization-Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 3)

This post is the third of our blog post series on how to design lessons for conceptual understanding. Part 1 here Part 2 here Strategy 3 : Generalizations You may have come across Lynn Erickson's diagram on the structure of knowledge. In my IB workshop's I always like to present the avocado model alongside this diagram when I am talking about facts. The intention of inquiry-based teaching and conceptually-driven understanding (or Concept-based inquiry- whatever terminology suits your fancy) is to enable students to make generalizations. In other words, can they transfer their learning to a new context because they have understood what they learnt. In order to make generalizations, we need to first plan lessons that help students acquire facts/topics that are interesting and worth knowing. Bringing in local and global issues that are relevant to the topic help students as they begin to compare the topics and see emerging patterns. Remember, facts and concepts have a syn...

8 Strategies to Overcome Math Anxiety in the Classroom

Have you ever considered what math anxiety may look like in your classroom? As I prepare to begin my lesson, handing out notebooks or math prompts, I look around and observe my students. As the lesson progresses, I continue to look around and monitor their behaviour. Are there some students who take time to settle down or start to talk about things completely unrelated to math? Does one student ask to go the washroom? Or maybe complain about a stomachache or a headache? Is there a student who may start crying or become angry and indulge in negative self talk? "I am dumb." or "I can never get this right!" and so on and so forth. The more subtle symptoms : Is a student being being extra chatty, taking time to settle down, obsessing about the answer, refusing to answer questions, seldom asking for help, hurtling through work or showing a reluctance to work with others. A broad categories these symptoms would look like this: cognitive difficulties emotional distress...

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