Throughout December and now January, the 3rd-5th SPARK classes have been working on a Geography unit where they are researching a certain part of the world. 3rd grade is doing the USA, 4th grade Europe and 5th grade Africa. The 3rd graders just got done with their project today and it ended up looking great! Pictures are attached below and here is what they had to do: There are 10 students in the class so I paired them off and gave each of them a region of the United States. We projected their regions on the board and they had to trace the outline of their region and all of the states in them on a large piece of colored paper. I gave them a list of things they should include on their map and let them loose on the computers to begin researching the things about their region. The students absolutely loved it! They were creating their own maps, able to use different colors, color pictures and symbols in the states, create state flags, and find facts they thought were important. I did not give them an exhaustive list of things to include, but they ended up going over the top and found things I did not think of putting on their maps that they really wanted to include.
It was amazing to see the motivation behind some of the students in wanting to find more and do more than what was required. It was evident that it rubbed off on the other students because when they heard the good idea, they also wanted to include it on theirs! Many of these students' interests were tapped into and they began asking questions about why certain things were the way they were. Many of the state nicknames they wondered about as well as the flags. Great facts can be learned about states with just their nicknames. I had a boy who is a sports fan and he had Oklahoma in his region. He found out that they were nicknamed the Sooner State and also knew the college team is the Oklahoma Sooners. He kept on looking to find out why they had this nickname and now knows the reason, because some settlers went to go into Oklahoma sooner than the official date to go settle there, giving them the name Sooners. This was a project that crossed many different student interests and learning types. Some groups worked really well together because there was the student who wanted to be creative and draw the info on the maps and there was the student who loved learning the different facts about the states. The project also kept them moving from their computer to their map so they were not sitting still the whole time and allowed for a lot of communication and interaction with their peers.
I tried making the project very student centered and I think I did a good job at it, but after having a conversation with a colleague the other day about a student centered classroom I believe I can make even more student centered. He talked about how in a 5th grade classroom at a different school, he observed the teacher teaching fractions. This was the first exposure to fractions they had and instead of teaching the students all the rules about how fractions work and what to do. He just gave them manipulatives and let the students play around with them first. He then had a whole class discussion about how fractions should be added. This went on for 3-4 days with the students discussing back and forth and thinking about how and why fractions should be added. After the few days of doing that, the teacher then introduced the rules for it, and the students took off with adding fractions. Because they had a good conceptual knowledge for how to apply the idea of fractions, they were able to see how those numbers worked when they were on the board.
Taking this same idea to the USA region project the 3rd graders completed. I would first just tell them they they are going to be assigned a region and a map to complete. I am not going to give them any of the things to put on the region, but instead let them discuss and come up with the list of what is important to include. If I tell the students what to do vs. them coming up with it, that is a lot more thinking they have to do and with it, more higher order thinking. Don't just give students a list of things to do, present them with a project or question and let them come up with what they deem to be important. One important thing to keep in mind is that it must be presented in a way to keep students interested and want them to go and learn in order for it to work out well. This is an idea that will work better with highly motivated students, but if you have a few of them, they can be the leaders and classmates will follow along and branch off of their ideas.
 |
| The whole USA put together! It is about 4 ft x 6ft |
 |
| A zoomed in picture to show the details a little better. (Sorry Alaska and Hawaii!) |
No comments:
Post a Comment