Salt and Pepper Science

No, not with them.

Yes, these ones.
Retrieved from http://goo.gl/04ZuPC.

Whether you're investigating it in a classroom, or using it to irritate your brother, static electricity is a lot of fun. It seems almost like magic sometimes watching a little blue spark jump from your finger to another person's (makes you feel a little like a Sith Lord) or watch materials move seemingly on their own. 

For our Science class at Brock University, Amanda Walker and I demonstrated a motivational demo involving salt, pepper, spoons, and the wonders of static electricity. Kudos to Amanda to searching through some science experiment resources to find it. Here is the full demo outline with full scientific explanation of the demo and guiding questions you can ask your students throughout and after the procedure. Now you too can make pepper move seemingly by itself, right from the comfort of your home or classroom!  

Try with your students, or with your children when you're stuck inside on a rainy day. There is minimal clean up and it is a way to get kids interested in atoms and electricity.

Financial Literacy: One of the most important things we can teach our students

"There is money; spend it; spend it; spend more; spend all I have."

--Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor

“Financial literacy is critical to the prosperity and well-being of Canadians. It is more than a nice-to-have skill. It is a necessity in today’s world.”

--The Task Force on Financial Literacy

When I was old enough to start receiving an allowance, my father gave me three little boxes of varying sizes. The largest box was for Long-Term Savings. That was for big, more expensive things that may take several months or even a year to save for. The medium-sized box was for Short-Term Savings. That was for toys or books that I might be able to get after saving for a few weeks or months at the most. The tiniest box was Mad Money, which 98% of the time went to purchasing the chocolate bar or candy I was allowed to have once a week. 

It was up to me how I divvied up my allowance, but for say a $10 allowance the breakdown usually went as follows:

Mad Money: $2

Short-Term: $5

Long-Term: $3

My father is a highly intelligent man and is financially-savvy; he gets it from his mother, my Nana, who is a shrewd investor. In my life now, even though I am not an expert, I have a healthy respect for saving, investing, and planning my finances. I have a couple points to my story:

1. It is important to teach children these skills while they're young

2. Not everyone has the same access to financial literacy and education at home, which is why we need it in our schools. 

This brief video from EduGains highlights some key points of financial literacy in Ontario classrooms. Financial literacy is something that should undeniably be part of the Ontario curriculum. I can hardly think of a more useful skill for helping prepare students for lives as independent adults than the principles of budgeting, saving, insurance, taxes, etc. As the EduGains video on Financial Literacy Highlights for Educators states, every aspect of life involves money and finances at some level. 

Financial literacy can be incorporated into any subject, as finances and spending relate to so many different topics, and students can communicate their understanding in so many different ways (write about it, act it out, draw it). Becoming financially literate is also helpful in developing critical thinking, decision-making, and consumer awareness. An indirect benefit of teaching financial literacy is that it helps students understand the importance of being lifelong learners, as their teachers may be learning aspects of financial literacy along with them. Financial literacy also helps students develop compassion. They can learn that not everyone earns the same amount of money or has the same access to resources as they do, which can give them a greater appreciation of what they have, and greater empathy for those that have less.  

How Could We Incorporate Financial Literacy Into the Classroom? 

It would be possible to incorporate financial literacy into the grade 7 “Natural Resources Around the World” unit. I’m thinking specifically through expectation B3.2 which requires students to “describe ways in which people use the natural environment, including specific elements within it, to meet their needs and wants.” This provides teachers with an opportunity to open up a conversation about needs and wants in spending and resource allocation, applying it on both a micro and macro level through thinking about individual and national needs and wants. Extending that further could be B3.4, where students must “describe the perspectives of different groups regarding the use of the natural environment to meet human needs.” It would be important and in some cases mind-blowing for students to understand that not every society is consumer-driven like Western society.

This is just one example, but financial literacy can become part of lessons for many subjects, including Math, Art, Social Studies, etc. What is a way you would incorporate it into your classroom?

Teaching Narrative Structure with Kurt Vonnegut

Note: this was originally posted on my literature blog 

I watched a video recently (see below) of Vonnegut delivering a lecture on the shapes of stories. It is entertaining and insightful, as Vonnegut often is, which made me think that it would be a perfect “Minds On” or “Hook” (or start of the lesson in layperson’s terms) in a unit on Narrative. This video is so approachable, it could be used for grades as young as 4, to as high as 12. First 24 seconds of the video is voiceover, so just skip ahead to get to the good stuff!

Putting narrative structure into a graphic format like this is a wonderful tool for visual learners because they’re able to more easily picture what is happening during major events of a novel (this is a high point, this is the denouement). It is also helpful for students who are more left-brained, logical, math and science-biased, or whatever term works for you, because it shows these students, “look, the study of English is not just feelings and metaphors; there are patterns within literature that are quantifiable.”

With younger grades, I would show them this video, discuss the important points Vonnegut brings up and then leave it mostly at that. If a grade 3 or 4 can recognize the “Man in Hole” or “Boy Meets Girl” plot structure, they are already on their way to being more aware of their own creative writing and the books and movies they consume.

In older grades, perhaps in grade 8 and most definitely by grade 9 and beyond, I would extend the initial conversation Vonnegut introduces to talk in more detail about Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth, also known as The Hero’s Journey. The Hero’s Journey is so essential to truly understanding fiction and the sooner students start to grapple with the concepts, the better.

Why is this important?

Figuring out the standard formulas (or really just the one important formula) in narrative helps make students better writers and readers. Knowing a structure that works will help struggling writers keep the story going and think more deeply about character, conflict, and conclusions. As a reader, students will be able to more easily recognize significant plot points and character archetypes. It will even strengthen their ability to take in and assess pop culture, as movies and TV shows all use the hero’s journey as well. Sometimes the reason why you dislike a book or movie, but can’t quite put your finger on why, is because the writer has inexpertly applied, or even omitted certain elements of the Journey. I love analysing movies for the components of the journey (here the hero is refusing the call to adventure, etc.), but I am a nerd with too much time on her hands, so there’s that.

I’m an advocate of teaching these concepts to students early because the sooner they understand the basic elements of narrative structure, the better they will be at applying those ideas to increasingly abstract applications of that structure. Yes, there are certainly times in movies and books where characters literally “cross a threshold” and leave their normal world behind. For example, in the new time travel show 11/22/63, based off the Stephen King novel of the same name, the protagonist, played by James Franco, urged by an older man (mentor archetype), reluctantly (because he’s refusing the call to adventure) steps into a closet at the diner in the present day and is transported back to the 60s (thus leaving the normal world behind).

Most of the time though, these elements of narrative are done in more subtle or metaphoric ways. Proust crossed a threshold when he ate the madeleine, but it is a psychological threshold into his memory, not a literal geographic location. If you teach students about narrative structure early on, you can introduce some more literal applications of the Hero’s Journey (many myths, speculative fiction, and adventure stories would serve as good examples) before moving on to more complicated narratives in later grades.

 The brief video of the Vonnegut lecture is a funny, simple way to start introducing these trickier concepts to students. Try it with some students of your own and let me know if they find it engaging!

Fun Canadian Heritage Grade 6 Inquiry Lesson Plan: Embrace the Chaos

Vassily Kandinsky (1913) Composition VII. [oil on canvas]
Treyakov Gallery, Moscow. 

"One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star."
--Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra 

Night and day. Yin and yang. Apollonian and Dionysian. Order and Chaos. We as humans love our binaries and dichotomies. The longer you live and the more you study though, you come to realize that you don't need to pick between one or the other, because often it is in finding balance between two seemingly oppositional ideas that we attain harmony. It is no different in a classroom.

Yes, of course teachers should have control over their classroom. Teachers are there to help focus and guide students, to make sure they are learning the curriculum, and perhaps turning into responsible, kind citizens along the way. But a little bit of messiness or chaos in the classroom can be a good thing, and in fact can allow students to reach creative heights they may not have achieved on their own. Inquiry based learning allows students to craft their own topics and present information in their own way (depending on how the teacher is organizing the inquiry). While this seems like a great idea in theory, it can also get a little messy, as my Brock teacher education group discovered while presenting our lesson plan demonstration.

You can read the full plan in a link below, but here's a brief summary of the lesson:

Subject: Social Studies
Grade: 6
Topic: Canadian Identity

Minds On: (5 Minutes)

• Propose inquiry question on Linoit: When you hear the phrase “Canadian Identity” what questions come to mind? What questions do you think others may have about the concept of Canadian Identity? e.g. someone from a different region of Canada or different country than you

• Have students access Linoit on their individual devices.
• As a class brainstorm some major concepts and ideas that come to mind

Action: (10 Minutes)

• Assign each table group a column in the Google Doc chart
• Have each group pick an idea from the Linoit word wall
• Use the brainstormed ideas and concepts as prompts for further questioning
• Have students ask as many questions as they can in ten minutes
• Encourage students to take ideas further and draw deeper connections

Consolidation: (10 Minutes)

• Have each table group explain why they chose their line of questioning
• Have students review the responses of the whole class
• Are there any responses they feel stand out?

Reflection

So seems like a decent plan in theory right? Its execution was a little rockier. First, our links didn't work, so there needed to be troubleshooting and some stalling on our part. This can happen in any classroom in any subject, so I'm not overly concerned about that. It is more something that you need to keep in mind when incorporating technology into your lesson. Teachers need to be simultaneously positive and cynical (or perhaps a more apt term would be realistic?). Positive in overall attitude, but cynical in that you need to plan expecting for something to go wrong, and then make a plan B (or C, D, E). We should've done some more tests of the links before presentation time, but it all worked out in the end anyway so I guess it's not as bad as it could have been.

Another thing I would change in doing the lesson again is providing a way through the discussion to hold students accountable for their contributions to the brainstorm. This could be accomplished through having students add their initials when they post, or if we were using a Google doc, to be logged into their Google account so teachers can track who made what contribution. This reduces the chances of the smart-alecks of the class adding silly, inappropriate, or merely unproductive questions to the brainstorm (as we received many contributions that were, uh, let's just say less than ideal). 

Finally, another change I would make would be to incorporate more modeled examples into the lesson. For example, before filling in the Google doc, I would show students that they are supposed to pick a vertical, rather than horizontal column to fill in with information. Many students are highly visual in their learning and if you merely show them what the work should look like, it will reduce the amount of confusion and follow-up questions. 

Apart from that though, I think the lesson went fairly well, if it was a bit sloppy in execution. But hey, that's a beast you just have to wrestle with when you're using inquiry in the classroom.

You can access the Google doc for the lesson plan here. Feel free to use or change how you see fit, but I just ask if you make any adjustments to it, let me know so I can try those changes out too!

Inquiring Minds Want to Know: Why We Should Have Inquiry-based Learning in Social Studies

"Oyster with Pearls." Photo.
Retrieved from http://wonderopolis.org/wonder/does-every-oyster-have-a-pearl/

"Why then, the world's mine oyster!"

--Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor

"Inquiry-based learning" is a phrase thrown around in educational theory and policy with increasing regularity. Is it really all it's cracked up to be? I'm going to say a big yes to that. Inquiry-based learning is something that would be a great addition to any classroom, but is not without its challenges. In this post, I'm going to share some challenges and benefits of incorporating inquiry-based learning into the classroom. 

Make Sure You're Well Prepared

Initially there is a lot of legwork the teacher has to do to prepare the students for the more independent work they must do as part of their projects. The teacher needs to model many different formats of presenting knowledge e.g. how to make a Prezi, how to summarize effectively, how to use iMovie, etc. Once that initial stage is finished though, the teacher’s job is much more as a facilitator than a lecturer. 

42, or the Answer to the Ultimate Question

Remember in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series how the answer to life, the universe, and everything was 42, but nobody knew what the question was? Finding the right question can be the hardest part of inquiry (or life, the universe, and everything, really). Educators must make sure students are asking appropriate questions in their projects. A question that is too broad or specific could end up causing frustration and difficulties for the student in conducting their investigation. There needs to be a fine balance between student ideas and teacher guidance to find good inquiry questions. 

Down the Internet Rabbit-hole

Another challenge may be student supervision and keeping them on task (how much of a challenge this is depends on your individual class). Because the students have free reign in terms of how they use their research time, some of the less focused students in the class may turn off track, so it is up to the teacher to be diligent in keeping everyone using their class time effectively.  

Freeeedommm!!

I am a big fan of inquiry-based learning and think that the pros certainly outweigh any cons of this teaching method. First, it gives students much greater freedom to explore their own interests and develop their own passions. Through becoming better acquainted with a topic, they may even find something that becomes a lifelong interest, or even a career.

Efficient Use of Limited Instructional Time

It allows teachers to be able to cover a large amount of curriculum material in a short period of time. Rather than trying to teach every little detail of the events and society in New France, by splitting the class up into various topics, each group or student can become an expert on a certain facet of the main concept and together the class can pool their knowledge at the end of the inquiry.           

It's Perfect for Differentiated Instruction

Inquiry- or project-based learning is much more accommodating to differentiated instruction. Rather than the traditional test-taking environment, where only a certain type of student is able to thrive, inquiry gives students the opportunity to play to their strengths. A student that is proficient in public speaking can shine when they give a presentation, in a way they might not have if the teacher had made them write an essay. ELL students can represent ideas visually instead of having to rely on writing they may not be confident with.

Develop Teamwork Skills While Learning

The last benefit I want to mention is the importance of collaboration in inquiry-based learning. Figuring out how to operate cohesively as a team is a skill that students will require no matter where life takes them (unless they are going to become a hermit, but that is unlikely). The projects help teach students leadership, how to delegate tasks, work equitably, and have fun with their friends as they’re learning. 

What has been your experiences with inquiry- and project-based learning? Inquiring minds want to know... (sorry I had to add that in once more...because puns and wordplay fill the void in my heart)