I had the pleasure of visiting Jocelyn Schmidt and her DECE partner Ashley in York Region District School Board. If you do not follow Jocelyn's blog you can check it out here. They are amazing educators who are identified as a "Learning@School" classroom for their Board. In a nut shell, this means that they are identified and supported by their board as a classroom that is open to visitors. It is easy to see why as their passion, their partnership and their commitment to student achievement is so evident.
I thought a quick and easy way to sum up my visit would be to share a few of my favourite things. Similar to an earlier post sharing great ideas from educators that I have visited this year. (You can check it out here)
By far (I think...as I am typing I am flooded by memories of great things...) my favourite "take-away" from my visit was the "2 stars and wish".
Although I have used this approach with providing feedback to students, this was a new way of using it for me. I LOVED how Jocelyn and Ashley used it to review the previous day's learning, and inspire further learning the next day.
At the end of every day (it only takes about 5 minutes) one of the educators prepares a PicCollage of the days learning. If you do not know about this app, check it out. It is free and super user-friendly. They title it "Our Learning Collage" with the date underneath. The educator puts in about 5-8 photos of different happenings from the day (a child writing a book, students exploring caterpillars, students outside noticing their shadows, building a structure, etc.) and she writes a sentence of explanation with each one. The following day they show this to the whole class during a group meeting. They asks the students involved to explain their learning and what was happening in each photo. Some students may actually read the note she has written on the page, but many just orally retell what was happening in the picture. Side note: the educators also upload this PicCollage to their class website at the end of the day so parents can be involved in the learning. They can ask their child questions about specific things that are happening in the classroom. LOVE that! If you do not have a class website or blog, consider making an email list with parent emails. It would be one click of the button :) I have found a website that has similar "Learning collages" check them out here for a visual :)
We saw this practice being used in 2 different classrooms. One classroom had the stars up on the board without sentences starters. Each day the children would look at the documentation of the previous day and come up with 2 things they did well (the stars) and identify one wish (the magic wand) for what they wanted to work on or do better that day. I thought this was a great way to involve students in the documentation, focus them on the importance of learning while at "centres", as well as develop oral language. In the other classroom, the 2 stars had a sentence starter with them. The first star said "We worked hard..." and the second star said "We practised..." and the magic wand said "We can learn more about.." The students used these prompts to frame their thinking.
As you might be able to see, the students then found words from their word wall and circled them :)
If you'd like to give this a try I have provided links to images of stars and magic wands for you to use. As always, check copyrights of images and so before use :)
Have fun! Let me know how it goes :)
This blog post has been edited: I was just surfing around on Jocelyn's website and found a post she did about this very activity. I referenced her blog earlier, but here is a direct link to the post talking about it :) http://ljpskindergartenteam.blogspot.ca
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