Our Spring project has a lot of learning opportunities, but I think the most valued in my mind is collaboration. One of our pillars is "we learn everywhere, we learn together." I see so much value in being able to work within a group of people that have different perspectives, different strengths, and different academic needs. I vividly remember those "group project days" when I came home so upset about the dynamics going on in my group. Now is the time to start building those skills around how we work towards a common goal with people that may be vastly different from us. There will be conflict, there will be some tears (lets be real, lots), but in the end we will learn the value of compromising and the value of realizing that my way may not always be the best way. I mention this because as we dive deeper into this Spring project, we need your support. Remember, true collaboration comes from students working together and not from the teacher telling them what to do. This can be a little messy at times. Trust the process :) We are setting up kindergarteners for their future PBL work at QAE and opening their eyes to the rich learning opportunities they have amongst their peers. We all have something to learn from each other. |
Our first collaborative exercise was to complete a 100 pc Africa savanna puzzle. The beauty of working on collaborative skills is for students to figure out for themselves how they should go about completing the task. Instead of assigning them jobs and telling them to do the edges first, I just dumped the pieces on the floor and said "go." Sitting back and watching what happens next is where the real learning takes place. After about 5 minutes, I stopped them and asked "what is working well, what is not working so well." From those questions we then start to make a plan for how we are going to complete the puzzle. Here were some of their thoughts...
Things we did well: - finding pieces that match - breaking off into groups (*this happened very quickly!) - putting the pieces together | Things to work on: - Sharing pieces with others - quiet voices - sharing space and not pushing |
The next day, our plan got more refined and we added different components as we went. We came up with having different groups of kids working on different parts of the puzzle (edges, elephant, giraffe, ect). They soon figured out the challenge of some animals overlapping each other and who was going to get what pieces became a problem. They worked together to join together their teams and work together. There were also a few kids who decided that they were going to be "piece finders" and just look around for pieces that each group needed. I tried to capture the messiness and awesome learning as best as I could :)
Our second attempt at collaboration came later in the week when we worked with our table groups to make a rocket! This time we had to think about a plan for what we were going to do before we started... yikes! Coming to an agreement about what our rocket should look like was not easy. Tears within the first minute definitely happened. We stopped working after 5 minutes and reflected on how things were going. This is what they came up with.
Things we did well: - Taking turns drawing (some groups) - Making mistakes on our papers and flipping them over to try again - Saying what we think (we are good talkers!) | Things to work on: - Being kind to one another (no name-calling) - Making sure everyone gets a turn - Knowing what to do when people in our group have different ideas - Sharing materials |
In the end, some groups ended up making one big rocket all together and other groups ended up adding a bunch of small parts that they all made to their poster like aliens, stars, ect. They were all proud of the work that they did! Check out their latest seesaw post :) Next week we are going to be diving into collaboration even further when we decide which world problem we are really going to focus on.
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