Students as Scribes
In a public school classroom sitting at a desk and taking notes is a pretty common occurrence, assuming that the students are old enough to take notes. This is not true for my classroom. There is no opportunity for my students to take notes and besides that, they are too young. Instead, I thought a great opportunity to have the students as scribes are during our STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) lessons. Once a month I do a STEM lesson and challenge.
"STEM is a curriculum based on the idea of educating students in four specific disciplines — science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — in an interdisciplinary and applied approach. Rather than teach the four disciplines as separate and discrete subjects, STEM integrates them into a cohesive learning paradigm based on real-world applications." Elaine J. Hom
During these challenges, I group my students into small groups equally distributed with 3, 4, 5 and 6-year-olds. Having my Kindergarteners as my group leaders. Normally I have the groups discuss their plan and then make a diagram or picture. There is always an objective to the challenge and depending on the particular challenge they are sometimes timed. I thought instead of having them write and draw on a piece of paper they could make notes on padlet. Padlet is an application to create an online bulletin board that you can use to display information for any topic. The best part is that it is free and you can connect to your google account. Here the students can make their own board of what the challenge is, the objective, what materials they used and so much more.
I chose one of my favorite challenges we do in February during our bird unit which is to make a birds nest using only the materials in the classroom. The objective is that the bird's nest must be able to hold a plastic egg for 10 seconds.
Here is the padlet that I made for this particular challenge.
Padlet is easy to use and navigate and I know for sure my kindergarteners would be able to use it.
You can pick can pick a blank template to start your board or you can use a ready-made template.
"STEM is a curriculum based on the idea of educating students in four specific disciplines — science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — in an interdisciplinary and applied approach. Rather than teach the four disciplines as separate and discrete subjects, STEM integrates them into a cohesive learning paradigm based on real-world applications." Elaine J. Hom
During these challenges, I group my students into small groups equally distributed with 3, 4, 5 and 6-year-olds. Having my Kindergarteners as my group leaders. Normally I have the groups discuss their plan and then make a diagram or picture. There is always an objective to the challenge and depending on the particular challenge they are sometimes timed. I thought instead of having them write and draw on a piece of paper they could make notes on padlet. Padlet is an application to create an online bulletin board that you can use to display information for any topic. The best part is that it is free and you can connect to your google account. Here the students can make their own board of what the challenge is, the objective, what materials they used and so much more.
I chose one of my favorite challenges we do in February during our bird unit which is to make a birds nest using only the materials in the classroom. The objective is that the bird's nest must be able to hold a plastic egg for 10 seconds.
Here is the padlet that I made for this particular challenge.
Padlet is easy to use and navigate and I know for sure my kindergarteners would be able to use it.
The one thing I see that may be a problem is looking up pictures, videos, and GIFs and inappropriate content that may appear. However, this is a problem all teachers run into when their students use the internet and this is when web and search blockers come in handy.
Danielle,
ReplyDeleteYour block is looking amazing.