#YYCLC Day22: Independent Reading

Some Grade 1 students came to enjoy independent reading during centers time at Keeler School.

Lego Logic: Building a City

I'm excited about this project: The students are creating a Lego City! They've been givin a lot each and with increasingly difficult challenges are tasked with developing their land, building houses, growing the community, and solving social problems around meeting the needs of the constituents.

Of course it costs money to build, so lego bricks aren't free. This means that after they've planned their layout, they've got to calculate the perimeter and then the total price to build a wall. Then they've got to build up... The greatest surprise in this is that as a school we ran out of red lego bricks (the cheapest at $2 per nub), meaning that students had to change their colours, costing them more money. More than a few students had to go back to the second challenge and re-build their floor plan.

We're really just getting started, so there will be much more to come!

The planning document is below (feel free to edit, please, we're looking for feedback!), and the challenge cards are here, too. Any thoughts will be hugely helpful and much appreciated!

Planning Document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NEDGzkbd062fZW0eGWYPp6QEBny0fXND19TE8gPLYmA/edit

Focusing Instruction on What Counts

Flipping the Commons

Focusing Instruction on What Counts

If it's rote, base-level thinking, don't evaluate them on it - give it to them... Focus assessment on the bigger stuff that actually matters!

When we make rubrics there often seems to be something about the "looks" of the final product... And the looks may have to do with rudimentary tech skills. Actually, not even tech skills: specific-program skills. All too often kids can get a great mark on something because their presentation or their tech-created product looks pretty - never mind the content. Teachers of course strive to balance the field, and I think I've found a good way to tackle a bit of this...

I'm in the process of creating tutorials that step students through this rudimentary tech stuff (that we shouldn't really assess kids on). They are 2-minute clips that show students how to click, where to click, and what to click to make the programs do what they want. By throwing them up on the Keeler Commons Virtual Space students are able to watch these videos when they want, where they want, and as many times as they want. This frees students up to focus their time on the content, their ideas, and their thinking rather than the how-to of technology.

The true benefit of this is that it puts me in different places at the same time. During a recent class my voice could be heard from 5 computers in the commons, helping kids with the "click here, then here" type stuff, so I could spend my time asking probing questions and focusing on the good work. It also helped set up a culture of support within the student community... a student asks another student, then checks tutorials, then asks me for help. All this while I am conferencing with groups and helping them assess the content and quality of their work and the expression of their ideas.

Giving 24-7 tutorials builds independence in students and anytime we build independence we build student success.

So I built a Lego Wall...

Lego and Math

So I built a Lego wall to teach math today! Initially I was going to glue the lego base-plates to a wall and wallpaper it from top to bottom - but I realized that the true learning potential came from being able to work on the base plates, and then to post them to share progress. 

Lego Baseplate with velcro on the
back to mount to the shelf.

After discussing a few options, we settled on velcro tape. We fastened it to the back and mounted the other side on the edge of a bookshelf. This way it could get that “wallpaper” effect that I wanted, while at the same time have the portability and individual work space of a single plate. Although I’ve just done the first “wall” I’m going to go in early tomorrow to make the other 3 (on the ends of the book shelves sticking out of our walls). 

Part of our work this year is going to be around experimenting and finding ways to use lego for math. Considering that it is a grid, we’ll be able to work on having students model patterning, multiplication (through arrays and groups), addition, subtraction, area, perimeter, rotations and an endless number of other tasks. Actually, it could be fun to set it up as a cartesian plane and play some battleship... Or to create different graphs to show collected data. 

I’m excited to move on this... Luckily we have an amazing teacher who wants to spear-head this with me, so we’ll be throwing some stuff up on this blog in no time, I’m sure!  

Some days I just love my job. 

Mike MacKenzie


Lego Wall: