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!