Creating: Making New Learning

My students are creating mostly ICT activities to share their learning from our Inquiry topic: Where are we in Space.  Some groups are working on Goanimate, some are creating videos to put into movie maker, and others are using publisher to make booklets.I have one group who are doing an old fashioned poster with paper and pen.  The kids are really motiviated to create little stories to share their learning.

This is nearly finished.

GoAnimate.com: space questions by room21bds


Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Isn't it great.

What grabs children can surprise

I used a model of a character description and then drew the character and talked about painting a picture in the mind.  Instead of getting my reluctant writers to draw their character first, I said that we would share our writing aloud and draw each other's pictures.  It was amazing.  Everyone wanted to share, and as we often drew what they did not expect, so it gave them excellent information for their editing.  This worked as an activity for the whole class in inspiring them, but maybe not so much with action research.  Still my reluctant writers were keen to write so everyone could draw their character. Sometimes, I get surprised at what inspires children.  I put the timer on to get my kids to write quickly.

Action Research

Last week I had my reluctant writers draw their narrative character in kidpix, and then I had them write.  J wrote the most he had ever written for me this year.  It was good to see him inspired.

Writing

I scanned in some introductions from a couple of books as examples of narrative beginnings.  We looked at them as a class, and then I sent 2 of the targeted students to write their example on the computer.  I had done this the previous day as well, but interestingly enough it worked better the second day, as these 2 students were keen to be on the computer.  They did not write much but they were much more enthusiastic. I live in hope.