Hooking Them In!

I'm a big believer in hooking students in to learning. I think it's worth spending time to create something engaging that will hopefully hook their imagination, excitement, curiosity or something inside students so they want to learn more.

Tomorrow I launch a new inquiry around the choices that preteens and teenagers make in their day to day lives. The grade 6 students I'm working with will end up creating infographics that will promote healthy choices.

We will start by watching the following video.

Then we will look at a few symbols and discuss them in the presentation below.

I am also going to make a conscious effort to give the students plenty of time to think and THEN talk. I am going to say very little throughout this task. I want to listen their ideas so I can shape the lessons to follow.

Designing Icons, Thinking Visually

After a meeting with a colleague this week, I have been thinking more about how I can make my thinking more visible. I would love to bring this in to my teaching more as well. I wonder if all students will benefit from this?

Visual thinking is certainly different than writing down all information. It requires the brain to think a little differently. I'm a very visual thinker. I often think and make connections with things that I have seen or by drawing something to get a better picture of it. I have enjoyed sketchnoting and drawing notes of keynotes and ideas I have come across in my work. I haven't done it as much as I would have liked and would love to make more time to draw. I am currently trying to think more visually. 

This weekend, a group of colleagues have challenged each other to sketch an icon that you haven't used before. I pushed it a little further. I designed an icon for 'evidence capture' as that has been I have been focusing on this week (see note below). My icon consists of four other icons brought into one and represents what it means to gather evidence of learning.

This is my entry in this weekend's #sketchdown. We document learning, we have conversations, we record video and voice to capture learning in different ways.  

In my work this week I have been all about gathering evidence. At this time of the year we are thinking back to work we have done and we start reflecting on how effective how work has been. We also want to share that reflection with others and also celebrate our successes. I have begun recording evidence of learning this year as we have focused on literacy throughout the year. We have come to learn that I this first year of this focus, we have realized that we have probably focused more on reading and writing literacy. We now need to move into more discipline based literacy. This will be an exciting shift as everyone, in their own discipline, will be able to focus on what it means to be literate in Math, or Science, or Music, or in PhysEd.