Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Fun With Lines in 4th Grade

My 4th Grade teacher is awesome! During our planning meetings, she tells me things like "I want to do things other than "substitution" with my technology activities." (Referring to the SAMR Model.) For this particular unit, students were learning about lines, line segments, points, etc. When talking with her, she wanted to take her students outside and have them explore and take pictures of lines, segments, etc. However, due to the absolute frigid  43 degree weather we were having, we decided to let the kids explore inside the school for these items. Once they had taken the pictures they were to put them into pic collage to organize them. Once they did that, they would come back to the classroom and app-mash it with Thing Link.  My teacher did an excellent job of putting together a rubric together for the students in which they were able to take with them on their exploration so that they can know what to expect. She also did a great job of fielding any questions that students had before getting started!

After students got their snaps, they started putting these images into ThingLink in which they had to answer 2 questions about what their line was and why they named it that particular line. Just to set the stage, the teacher and I had both been talking about how we can ask more "open ended questions" to get more out of the students. We tried that approach today and boy was there a noticeable difference one the ball got rolling! To be quite honest, there was a lot of "awkward silence" when she started asking these types of questions, however this teacher kept probing until she got the answer she was looking for! Her questions were so good that you had students going to the board (on their own!) to justify why they named their line what they did!





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