This Weeks Outline:
Monday- Welcome to your learning room On Monday, we scrambled the kids up into their new working rooms. The overall themes of this year's working rooms are: Technology, Environment, Health & Wellbeing, and Human & Animals Rights. Our vision is that within each working room, kids will be able to collaborate and work alongside other students with similar issues. Although they may not be exactly the same, there is a likelihood that a student investigating water pollution and oil spills, or literacy in China and Child Welfare in China. After some team building activities we dove into creating some working room essential agreements, and then moved on to sharing some prior knowledge about our topics. We did by having students fill out concentric circles. For the last circle, students moved around the room and made connections to one another's issues. Tuesday - Friday - Key Concept Questions & Lines of Inquiry In the past, we have had a bit (lot) of difficulty when it comes to having student generate questions to guide their inquiries, sot his year we tried something new. The initial task for for students to generate as many questions as possible. We then worked as a class to critique each other's questions. We moved around the room 'musical chair' style and wrote one of 3 things about each others questions. We could give a checkmark if it was a great questions, a question mark if we didn't understand the question, or we could simply make little changes to the question to make them more grammatically correct. Once we finished this process, all students participated in a question think tank. In small groups, each student took turns sharing a bit about their issue. The other students in the group then had a chance to also ask questions and students could add these to their questions banks. By the end of this process, students were excited by what they had on their pages and many of them commented on the benefit of collaborative process. Our next task was to organize our questions by key concept. This was surprisingly easy for many students compared to years before. As a school, we are definitely starting to see the payoff of having students be a part of the PYP program for the past several years. Making Lines of Inquiry - Thursday & Friday When it came to making Lines of Inquiry, students had the opportunity to review the lines of inquiry from earlier in the year. This helped them to recognize a) what a LOI is, and b) how to formulate their own LOIs. For this process, we had most students write down their biggest, guiding questions on little tiny pieces of paper. They then sorted them into like/similar groups. Once these groups were in front of them, it was easier to recognize what their LOIs could potentially be. Now that most of our students have their lines of inquiry made, they will be ready to launch into some research and finding out next week! A few other things we accomplished this week:
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