One of my fifth grade bloggers recently posted about an enrichment camp she attended over fall break. I have been giving a lot of thought lately to ways to bump up their reflections. Generally students of this age will say they had fun, were bored, liked it or didn’t, or similar responses. They have not been asked to do a lot beyond that. I am working on helping the fifth grade students improve their reflective writing posts and asked these questions of one of the students:
Any suggestions of other ways to ask questions to help them think a little deeper about their learning????
Flickr photo credit: Reflections in bubbles from Lance and Erin’s photostream
Nice article for students who are studying this will help them in generating new techniques of learning.l
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Taylor
Business Sales
Thank you for sharing this experience. I am hoping to begin blogging with my students second semester this year. It is encouraging to read about the relevance and motivation attached to blogging.
I am also a 5th grade teacher. I am very confident when I help facilitate math, science, social studies, and reading. But I am constantly at war with myself over the writing process and implementing our district’s writing program. I have discovered that many students cannot easily put memories into words. It is a visual in their head. Kids are really good at mind-mapping what they’ve learned in science by creating a kind of a weblike visual representation of everything they learned. They often use visual pictures and then sharing the mind-map with a partner and discussing the web. I think this process may work for writing as well. Do you have access to Discovery Education? I ‘ve added a link to a segment of a video that showed mind-mapping in use.
http://player.discoveryeducation.com/index.cfm?guidAssetId=8226729A-D7A4-4626-925E-74B067615E2F&blnFromSearch=1&productcode=US
I am taking a Web 2.0 class and one of the articles led me to EduBlog Insights where I read your blog. I am a 6th-grade foreign language teacher in the International Baccalaureate Program for the Middle Years. One thing I am working on is getting my students to be more reflective–one of the important tenets of the IB program. I love the questions you asked a student. I am going to use some of these questions to get my students to be more reflective regarding their learning. Thanks.
I find that many people not just students are the same way as you describe. Someone may ask you, “How was work today?” or “How was your day? Many people simply respond, “It was good,” or “Could have been better.” They rarely share more information unless they are asked to give more detail. I am also a teacher, and I think your questions are very thought-provoking. These questions promote critical thinking and will definitely get them to really refelect their learning experience. I would aslo suggest for them to think about what could have been done differently, if anything, to make them learn the topic better. Thank you for the ideas!
Very good teaching guide, thank you for your good method, I think we should allow students more self-point. More creative
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