Skip to main content

How we share the world: involving students in the planning process

Summary of Unit - Poster


In the last unit, I kept my central idea a mystery and tried to provoke my students' interests. This time, I will try another strategy. They will have everything on their platter ( from the poster above). I will encourage students to help me plan the lessons. They will be given the option of choosing the graphic organizers which they think will best suit them, in order to pursue the lines of inquiry. In groups, they will decide which resources to use and will subsequently delegate work to each other. They will take total control of their learning. My students are new to PYP (inquiry-based learning) It will be interesting to see how they perform.

Here are the Graphic Oganizers the students will choose from.
(Source: http://www.educationoasis.com/curriculum/graphic_organizers.htm)

My students mainly come from ESL backgrounds and find the websites very hard to understand. I have spent a few pleasant minutes browsing the internet for the most suitable websites and created a customized search engine for them. I hope this faciltates their learning.I have placed it in their class blog.



http://kidblog.org/4AKAH/naini/your-own-search-engine-for-this-unit/




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

Unravelling the inquiry cycle in a PYP class room

“ People can make choices to support the sustainability of the Earth’s energy resources .” Me to students : Does that make sense? Students to me : (after a while)...not really...  Their understanding of "energy" during the pre-assessment task also reflected a superficial knowledge of the term. And thus our unit of inquiry started. As I was browsing the net, I came across this picture prompt- a map, which I thought would serve as a great provocation. The annual energy consumption per person . Kids love guessing where countries are, so it was a great way to address some geography at this point.  I had also been reading Craig Dwyer's  post  which inspired me to change my inquiry cycle and use a simpler one. Wonder (while exploring)- Explore (while wondering)- Create (while reflecting)- Reflect (with subsequent wonderings). I was feeling more at ease now. The map allowed the students to make a lot of inferences based on patterns whi...

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...