Learning in Progress

At the end of the year I decided to change things up a bit with first grade and conduct an author study through a project based learning inspired format (CCSS RL.1.3, W.1.7).  I had been working with first graders on science standards through most of the late winter and early Spring, and wanted to give them the opportunity to capitalize on some of the research and collaboration skills they had developed through the course of that study. After looking at the resources available to us, I settled on Tomie dePaola for our author of choice.  He is featured on our favorite database, PebbleGo , and we had a number of books by him that we would be able to choose from to compare and contrast. I prepped the students by introducing them to the Super 3 research model using a YouTube video I found.  The video is concise, visual and really helps even the youngest student understand what they need to do to complete a project. The author study was essentially divided into two big...

I should start out by saying - I am not a science teacher, nor do I play one on TV...I'm my school's teacher librarian, and I'm seriously trying to support our school's adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Last summer when I met with our first grade team to review programming needs for the year and to explore options for collaboration in the library, a big need that we identified was the implementation of the NGSS.  We also wanted to be able to work in something for CCSS W.1.7 "participate in shared research and writing projects". After some discussion, we settled on working with the NGSS standards that fall under the "Waves and their Applications" heading.  The first grade teachers were already working with other first grade teachers across our district to develop their science lessons and investigations, so I really only had to reinforce the learning that was happening in the classrooms until it was time to conduct the inv...

When we get back to school after Winter break, I'll be reviewing the Big 6 research process with 4& 5th graders and introducing it to 3rd. In the past, I've gone through a PowerPoint presentation and talked the kids through the process, but I really wanted to speed up that introduction.  To help with that, I made a PowToon video that keeps the intro to under 4 minutes.  Find the video [ here ]. I've also spent some time revising the Project Planner I use with the kids to provide them with some structure in considering the Big 6 steps.  The PowToon actually provides a demonstration for how to use the project planner.  You can find the planner [ here ].  I will likely the pause the video occasionally to add information and provide more of an explanation or to answer questions. When kids are actually doing their research, I have a standard set of graphic organizers for them to use that requires them to record all of the source information.  Thi...

This week I’m going to introduce my third graders to the Big 6 Research Model . In graduate school, for my LMS classes, they really promoted this as the perfect way to help kids learn how to research a topic, so last year, I made a full out attempt to teach my 5 th graders to use it for their Social Studies Fair.   I did a PowerPoint presentation and developed some graphic organizers based on examples I had seen.   And, they had no idea what I was talking about. I tried the model again with my STLP students a few weeks later as a way to help guide them in developing a technology project to do for our regional completion, and it worked!   Of course, it took one of my 5 th grade members to explain to me that it worked that time because I walked them through each step instead of just zipping through the directions for a social studies project they were mostly working on by themselves.   It made sense – they needed me to model for them how to use the materials and ...