Category: Teaching and Learning Activities

Sometimes the simple things…

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Sometimes you have a lesson that is perfect just because it taps into the most basic needs and interests of your students. No technology, no complicated set-up, just pure engagement.

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Today I taught one of those lessons with my Prep and Year 1 classes. These boys are mostly nice children, although there are a few in there with poor social skills or impulsive behaviour that can interrupt carefully-planned activities. Many of these children are still learning to read with any fluency, and cannot write long pieces of text. Therefore a lot of our response-to-literature activities include drawing, colouring, matching images to words, those sorts of things.

Not today.

Today we were interactive.

Our book today was Donald Loves Drumming by Nick Bland. Young Donald the rhino has a drum kit which he loves to play, but he is just as happy to drum his sticks on any other object available, or to clash cymbals, or do anything that is louder, faster, messier, higher or more dangerous! There is so much boy-focused action in this book that I thought we should have some in our class, and let them get really involved in the story. (I’m sure that wiggly little girls would enjoy it too, but as my school is boys-only, the point is moot for me.)

The Activity:

    I asked everyone to space themselves out further than usual so that there was a little circle of space around each child.

    Every time I said ‘drumming’, the boys had to drum madly on the floor until I said ‘stop!’.

    We practiced drumming and stopping a couple of times, with lots of reinforcement of great listening.

    I told the children that we were going to have a lot of fun with this, but that we could only do the drumming if everyone followed the rules.

    I read the book to the class, putting plenty of emphasis and expression into every ‘drumming’, and using very sharp and clear ‘stops!’.

    The boys were thrilled with the chance to get really physical and a bit noisy with the story, and loved the challenge of stopping exactly on my command.

    As the story went on I introduced some other actions, such as wiggling fingers to show rain, a falling sound or hammering sound to match events in the story.

The Result:

I am really pleased with the way this lesson turned out. We didn’t have any cute pictures to take home for the fridge, and I am kicking myself for not thinking to set my iPad up to record the sound of their drumming, but that wasn’t the aim. I wanted the boys to recognise their role as participants in the story. Given that these boys are 5, 6 or 7 years old, a really physical activity is a beautiful match for their stage of mental and social development.

Although this lesson required no technology, I think it demonstrates why things like iPads are so exciting for children. They are still learning about the world by physically manipulating it, or by moving their bodies or making a noise, and activities that reward those kinds of behaviours will be more interesting to children. When we give children access to technology, we need to make sure it matches their needs and abilities in a rich way. I think that my classes had morefun today drumming on the floor than they did in other lessons when we manipulated an ebook app on the IWB.

I know I did!

Pulling the Moves with Google

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We’ve had a big emphasis these past few weeks on learning how to search effectively, using advanced search options and Boolean search terms. First was a staff session, then working these skills into all of the lessons for years 3 to 6. While asking student to use these skills with their research I was trying to come up with a different way to present these techniques, and found myself doing air quotes whenever I talked about using “quote marks” to keep words together in a search string. From there it was a short step to the left, and then a step the ri-i-i-i-i-ight… (Actually I think my mental soundtrack is a little more Chicken Dance than Time Warp)

My sequence is:

  • Quote marks – the easiest one to do and remember
  • Minus the moustache – for using a minus sign to remove unwanted words
  • Talky talky – make a speaking motion with your hand in front of your mouth; this is for setting the language filter, which is useful when researching international current affairs issues
  • Reading glasses – means set the reading level filter
  • Watch the time – setting a date range

To begin with I ask the whole class to stand up, raise their hands, and copy my actions. I do not tell them what it is or why – much more fun to keep them guessing! We run through the actions until everyone can do the sequence easily, then they do it without me.

Once everyone is seated again I ask them to pull up Google advanced and work out which fields relate to which action. On some pages (depends on which country version and which browser you are using) there will be small font instructions on the right-hand side of the page, describing what each filter does and how to use punctuation to enter that filter into a search string. The students then go ahead and try out the filters to see how that changes their searches. Each year level has its own Inquiry topic, so at the moment we have:

  • Year 3 are researching Space, so we try “black hole” -song -movie
  • Year 4 are researching change, via erosion and life cycles, so we are filtering for place names, specific weather-related causes of erosion, readability and date ranges
  • Year 5 are researching Antarctica, so we have lots of “emperor penguins” -“Happy Feet”
  • Year 6 are researching Asian countries, so we are filtering by language and region

At the end of the lesson everyone has to stand up and perform the actions again, and I have promised a sticker to every person who can do the whole sequence at our next Library lesson, which is a week away.

Buzzing like Bees

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Baby woolly mammoth #lyuba #historic #hongkong

Image courtesy of Marcel_Ekkel via flickr CC licence By-NC-ND

I just had a very active lesson with Year 1, who are learning about the non-fiction resources in the Library. Last term we spent a lot of time looking at non-fiction books, learning all the vocabulary – glossary, index, keywords – and identifying the purpose of each aspect of a non-fiction books. Just as we were beginning that unit there was a special exhibit in a major shopping mall in Hong Kong, showcasing Lyuba the baby mammoth. We kicked off our unit by looking at the website and talking about the kinds of things we can learn about mammoths and dinosaurs through non-fiction books.

Fast forward past Book Week and we arrive at today – the Year 1 teachers have requested more teaching of skills to do with locating books in the Library, so I have been thinking about how best to convey the concepts behind the Dewey Decimal System. Our Year 1 students are generally quite confident readers, but as in any other school we have some who are highly skilled and some who are still beginners. This means that I need to have some hands-on activities to convey the fundamental concept of organising information by subject groupings without relying upon text-based materials.

Image from Peter Carnavas’ website http://petercarnavas.com

 

Today I read the class a lovely story on the theme of books: The Children Who Loved Books by Peter Carnavas. During the discussion that followed I prompted the students to think about what books are good for – inevitably someone piped up to say that you can learn things from books, which gave me the perfect opening to link to learning about dinosaurs last term and what kinds of books were those? cue the term ‘non-fiction’.

Hands-on Activity: the students were asked to seat themselves in a wide circle on the floor, then I walked around dropping books in front of each child. I had selected four books each from various subject areas – vehicles, fairy tales, energy, animals (mammals), poetry, prehistoric animals, and sports (backup pile) – and as I went around I made sure to scatter the books so that close friends did not all end up with the same subject. I then asked everyone to show the circle the front cover, back cover and spine of their books, and then to point out the title, author (if shown) and spine label of their book.

This is where it gets energetic.

Bees – original picture courtesy of Bengt Oberger (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Everyone had to stand up and try to find three other people to make a group with, without talking. I did not tell them to form subject groups, but said yes or no when they came to show me their pairs and groupings. The “without talking” bit didn’t last very long, but it did keep the noise down to an acceptable level as 20 children shuffled around each other looking very like a colony of bees doing the pollen dance! Once everyone was in a group of four I asked the groups to take turns standing up and tell everyone why their books belonged together. It was really nice to see that one of the boys who is a lower-level reader was the quickest to identify the subject of his group’s books (vehicles), and became the spokesperson. The next time I do this I will again make sure that the quietest get something on their favourite topic, and more dominant students get something unknown to them – supporting and challenging each according to individual need.

The next task was to sit and look at the outside of their books and see whether they could find some other clue as to why those books belonged together. Once one group had identified the numbers on the spine label I asked them to tell everyone what they had found, and then we went around and asked each group to look at the spine labels and say which numbers they had, to confirm that every group had its own set of numbers according to the subject of their books. It became very loud at this point, as they read numbers out loud and compared within their groups. This is where it starts to be very challenging for Year 1 – we organise the non-fiction by Dewey Decimal numbers, yet these children aren’t quite ready to cope with 3-digit numbers yet, let alone decimal places.

So how do I modify this concept for these young learners? My goal is for all the students to understand that each general type of book has a number on the spine label, and that if they can locate similar numbers they can look along the shelves until they find the right section – so look at the 500 to find animals for instance. Next week will be another hands-on activity (the more active students, who are not always boys, will enjoy this one!) – we are going to ‘snake’ around the shelves, trailing our fingers across the numbers, to see if we can discover how the numbers go up from 001 to 999 as we go along.

 

Going for Good Results

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The focus of the second unit of the Google Power Searching online course is “Interpreting Results”.

The first lesson demonstrated information panels that show up on the right of the search page when searching for information on terms such as “animals, famous people, landmarks, countries, movies, books, works of art, sports teams, and chemical elements”. Trial and error and the discussion forum showed that this is only available via Google US, i.e. www.google.com, and will not work with other countries’ Google pages, e.g. www.google.com.hk.

These information panels are pretty interesting – actually what they really remind me of is the summaries at the beginning of lengthy encyclopaedia articles.

Each of the black subheadings is a clickable link, leading to a page of results on that more refined search term. (click picture to see details)

The second lesson discussed using [define] in the search box to locate definitions for unfamiliar words. Also there is an additional ‘Dictionary’ search tool available under the “Show Search Tools” link at the bottom of the left-hand menu.

 

The third lesson discussed refining searches by media types – not just images and videos, but also news. The presenter also demonstrated the range of options available under the “More” tab at the very top of the Google results page – such as Google Scholar, Google Books, Google Finance.

 

The fourth lesson examined the anatomy of a search result – Page name linked in blue, url in green, site abstract (or snippet) in black. Briefly noted in that lesson was how to look at the domain name of a url to recognise type of site e.g. “.gov”. Attention was also drawn to the use of ellipses … to indicate truncated or in some way cropped text.

 

The last lesson looked at filtering results by content such as news, blogs, recipes, discussions; if you click the “More” link there in the search menu there are a range of different filters you can apply. Very helpful for researching current events, or when looking only for public opinion on something – or you just want a way to use up two eggplants.

 

This is proving to be an interesting way to use an hour of my day – I could spend a lot of time just playing with the various search tools, getting to know them better. I really would like to share this with my colleagues, and use some of these activities with my students, particularly in the context of refining a search.

One thing I note about this course, though, is the way that the presenter speaks as if Google is a really amazing search expert, sitting on the other side of the computer helping you – it’s a little bit toothpaste-commercial, but that doesn’t change the fact that we all need to have really good search skills, if only to avoid wasting hours of our precious time.

 

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