Share-a-Story

The past few weeks we've been focusing on the key concepts of change and perspective.  Key concepts are a big part of the IB PYP program, and this year, I've worked hard to weave them into everything we do instead of isolating them in our units of study.

Key Concept Tags - image found HERE

For example, though we're studying ways cultures from the past have influenced culture today (change and perspective!) we've also found examples of change in math as we look for differences in quantities and change numbers into different forms.  Read aloud always offers a great opportunity for perspective, as does class conversations in general.

However.  It's what we've been playing with in writing that was the most exciting connection to our key concepts, at least for me.  We've been working on parts of speech, subjects and predicates, and sentence types as a part building *excellent* sentences.

So.  For this task, the kids were given the prompt: "I opened my closet door and I was shocked when I saw........"  Everyone was given about five minutes to finish the sentence and start building a paragraph.  Once that time was up, pieces were read to the class, who was surprised to hear so many different ways to finish it!  Hello, perspective!  Welcome to writing!

From there, I collected all their papers, and redistributed them so that no one got their own.  They were then given three minutes to continue writing where the original author left off.  After three minutes, the papers were passed again, and the process was repeated until everyone had added to four different papers.  Then, papers were returned to their original author.

Talk about change!  As students re-read their original stories with everyone else's perspective plugged in, they were shocked to see how much the story changed from inception to completion!  Not only that, when we talked about how the original author started the story, and where they would have taken it.... the perspectives of their classmates was completely different than what the authors saw in their heads!  All in all, it was a fun activity for the Thinkers, and a great way to exemplify two key concepts in our everyday curriculum adventures!

What's In A Name?

It's a pretty common question, I suppose.  Why names matter.  How they "fit."  All that good stuff.  This morning I had a little soap-box moment while walking my dog, aptly named Sparky Anderson.

Sparky is a rescue.  I got him when he was four and a half.  His name at the time was Porky.  This morning, while we were out for a stroll on this oh-so-lovely spring day, I was watching him.  He's a bit of an odd pup, preferring to wrestle me for a dead leaf than eat any food scraps he might come across.  But in my eyes, he is SUCH a Sparky!  He bounces around, hurling his nine pound body as fast as he can to chase bits of invisible fluff in the air.  And when we reach a certain point in our walk, when the house is in sight, we play our little game.  All I have to say is "one……" and he's no longer the respectful walker at the end of the leash, instead, he becomes a racehorse, pressing against the starting gate.  "…..two……" he looks back at me and bounces in circles.  "….three!" I drop the leash and he races off to the door where he patiently waits for me to catch up.

What's this got to do with education?  I'm getting there.  Actually, I'm there.

My dog is SUCH a Sparky!  He lives up to that name with every fiber of his being.  Even when he's sleeping on my feet (as he is now) his wild mess of fur is quite Sparky.

My class is called the Thinkers.  I decided on that name when, after four years of teaching third grade with "no" class name, I got tired of hearing my students ask what "we" could be.  They wanted things like "Ms. Diem's Dinosaurs" or "Ms. Diem's Devils" none of which were very fitting.  "D" just isn't one of those last names that goes well with a "thing" like that.  (Trust me, it's a problem I've been battling since childhood, when all my friends were making little trinket boxes called "Stacey's Stuff" and the like.)

That's when I decided if I was going to succumb to peer pressure, it was going to be a powerful name.  Something my students could live and become, not just an animal (though quite cute in younger grades!) The Thinkers were then born.  It was quite perfect, actually, Ms. Diem's Third Grade Thinkers.  Being a Thinker is a learner profile trait that we emphasis school-wide, and here my class was, calling themselves Thinkers right off the bat!

Though I now teach fourth grade, I kept the name Thinkers because it is just too good to change.  It's so true, too.  Watching my Thinkers pose problems for each other, inquire, research, act, learn, grow, THINK is so rewarding!  I feel like now, more than ever, the name fits, as we're doing so many new (to me) things that are carrying the Thinkers into the future, where they'll be the ones shaping it into some not-yet-thought-of masterpiece of thoughtfulness!

The Dot.....

Have you heard of or read the book The Dot by Peter Reynolds?  It's a very simple story, yet, there are SO many ways it can impact a classroom and connect to curriculum.

For my class this year, I found the book in a backward sort of way.  See, I found this really neat app called colAR via my twitter network.  Yes, it's supposed to be spelled that way, cause the AR stands for augmented reality.  Now, I'm not an expert by any means on augmented reality, but I am pretty good at finding ways to make things fit into the curriculum and justify spending precious instructional time on said activities.

So when I found this app, and saw how you can totally bring to life your dot drawing, I had to dive in.  Really.  It was a must.

How did I connect it to curriculum so that I could spare time in our overly scheduled day?  Good question.

First, we read the book and took it at face value - absorbing and exploring the basic lessons of believing in yourself, trying your best, perspective, perseverance- you know, the good stuff.  From there, the Thinkers illustrated their own dots, drawing pictures that represent them- what they're good at, what they enjoy doing, what they're proud of, etc.

Then came the fun part.

Using the (free) colAR app on our four classroom iPads each table got to play with their dot - which became a three dimensional toy on the screen.  Even better, it was curriculum night, so the dots were proudly displayed on desks so that parents could download and play themselves that evening.

It was a big hit all around, but how, you might be wondering, does it tie in to curriculum?  I mean, this is 4th grade, we don't usually have time for celebrations like International Dot Day (9/15) and things like that.

But this was different.  See, we study a bit of government in 4th grade.  And we always start the year off with a constitutional exploration, including the preamble (we write our own!) and symbols of the United States.

Symbols.  Yep.  Now you're thinking.

So day one was the fun day where we read the book and created our dots, complete with symbols that represent us, what we like, what we're good at, and so forth.

Day two is where the connections connected and the lightbulbs lit.

Cause it was time for us to design a class flag.  With symbols that represent our classroom.  Which is how the Thinkers spent a good part of their afternoon (after, of course, we reviewed the dot story, played a little more with our dots, and discussed symbols that represent us, the United States, and our classroom.)

I can't wait to see what the Thinkers come up with when the flags are revealed later this week!