Turning a flat activity into a super learning mission!

Hi bloggers! Today’s post is about turning two flat activities into super learning missions! It is the perfect way to engage your students in their process of learning. This post is going to have just one super learning mission, but I will upload the next one soon. Do not miss it and check it out!

First of all, I have to say that it is a special post, because I have been collaborating with another classmate, her name is Andrea, she is a good student and an excellent teacher, you can also visit her blog, it is full of good ideas, advises and educational tools which can be use in the classroom.

The best way of learning is through collaboration, because as human beings, we live in society, and as teachers, we have to foment collaboration in our classrooms. We can find different ideas from our students in a collaborative situation, that means: “The sum of different ideas or suggestions, create a good product”. The students can reach the same goal from several ways, and all members of the group can provide opinions, concerns and suggestions; for that reason, the result is more enriched.

Let's start! 

As you know I have been developing the lesson of "Diet, Digestion and Excretion", but this time I am going further, collaborating with another classmate, and with the project "No me cuentes historias, dibújamelas" (Do not tell me stories, draw them), and what is more, turning flat activities into super learning missions.

The nutrients in food Super learning mission

This project will develop a super learning mission for you all, taking into account the flat activity we have previously created. To do so, the theory for this mission is taken from an Oxford education textbook, called “Think, do, learn!”

 This textbook has being created bearing in mind a Clil Methodology and for this reason it has lots of scaffolding, but we want our students to produce and be active instead of passive learners. Because of this, in the following sections you will see how we have created a super learning mission, where students are going to be able to produce and generate their own artefact.  

The purpose of this first super learning mission is to provide lot of scaffolding, guiding students in their process of learning, producing better results and to make sure that the children understand all the process. In that way, the pupils are going to be able to do the next activities with less help or without it because they get use to do it.

It is important to follow a series of steps in order to present the activities from LOTS to HOTS. It is relevant as teachers to introduce these activities in our teaching process, each of these concepts are defined as follows:

• LOTS: Lower order thinking skills. They are used in basic or “easier” activities such as remembering and dividing.
• HOTS: Higher order thinking skills. They require higher skills, examples of HOTS are: Reasoning and evaluating.

Here it is a chart with more examples:

LOTS	HOTS
to remember information	to develop reasoning skills
to order information	to develop enquiry and discussion
to define objects	to develop creative thinking
to check understanding	to evaluate the work of oneself and others
to review learning	to hypothesise about what could happen

All the activities should be presented from LOTS to HOTS, increasing the level of difficulty, as the Bloom’s taxonomy of learning says:

According to that structure, the following activities will follow this structure, increasing the level of difficulty and decreasing the level of scaffolding.

First of all, the teacher has to present the lesson to the students, in this case “The Nutrients in Food”. The teacher has to ask to the children in order to activate their prior knowledge about this topic. Some questions can be:

• What are the nutrients?
• Do you know the name or the features of any nutrient?
• Has the bread nutrients? and the vegetables?

 Let’s know the nutrients!

After the questions, the teacher reads the text about nutrients with the students twice through “popcorn”. That is a way to foment autonomy in students, because the pupil who is reading is in charge of choosing the next person for reading. In this way, the child can stop reading or keep reading as he/she want.

It is also important to foment the gender equality in the classroom, for that reason, the person who is reading has to choose another person of the opposite gender.

  

Do you know how to summarize?

It is time to show to your students the importance of summarizing contents, the best way of teaching them how to do it is through scaffolding and making them thinking. Here below are showed the steps that the teacher follows to show his/her students how to summarize contents:

• Giving instructions: We have to give instructions and an step by step to our students in order to make them think and reflect about the exercise, for that reason, we will provide to the pupils a paper sheet with some instructions, and they have to follow it in order to summarize the contents:

• Adding visual support: It is important to communicate to our students that they can use their creativity making schemes. This fact takes into account those students who have visual skills, in this way; they can add drawings to their schemes.
• Questions: Asking to the students about each step of the scheme, for instance:

- What are the key concepts in the text?
- Give me some relevant words to define/relate these key words.

*The step by step is a good way to guide students in their process of learning, following all these steps, we will make sure that our students understand what we want from them.

As it is their first time creating schemes, the teacher will create the scheme using the white board and with help from the students. Here it is the result:

Once the students have learnt how to summarize, they are going to do a different activity, related to the food pyramid. They have to read the text from the book twice, doing “popcorn”, clarifying the doubts during the reading.

Hereafter, we will provide our students a super mission! The children have to either look for food magazines at home, or get them in a supermarket. The objective is to get different types of food and for classifying them in the model of the food pyramid which is shown here below:

In order to introduce our students in the using of the new technologies, we will use scratch jr., an application which allows students to create their own videos through drawings. As the students are learning, they will need lot of scaffolding from the teacher to learn how the application works. Although the students can choose any topic from the lesson, we will provide you a possible example of project, created in collaboration between the teacher and the students. They can also take advantages from reviewing the “Nutrients in Food”. Here it is our example:

Blogs:

http://checkitout28.blogspot.com.es/

http://andreascreativeteaching.blogspot.com.es/

Objectives:

Natural's Science:

• To know the nutrients in food (proteins, minerals and vitamins, carbohydrates and fats).
• To know the food pyramid and its features.

ICT:

• Expressing ideas and thoughts.
• Work in groups.
• Use logical connectors.
• Design and make a project.
• Develop projects and explain thoughts and ideas using creative tools.

Contents:

Natural's Science:

-        The nutrients in food

-        The food pyramid

Materials:

The text book, scheme, ipads and the scratch jr. application.

Methodology:

An active methodology is important not only for the students development but also for the activities which offer the possibility to discover and learn.

One of the main points is that the teacher’s role is to guide, monitor and facilitate students their learning processes, helping them to learn by giving them opportunities to explore and create.

Assessment Criteria:

• Uses logical connectors and knows their meanings
• Shows interest for what his/her peers are saying
• Shares ideas an thoughts in public
• Matches ideas and opinions with his/her peers to reach agreements
• Learn how to use the application "Scratch jr."
• Interacts with empathy using social abilities
• Express ideas using ICT tools

Timing:

- 4 sessions of 45 minutes each.

Activities:

First introduction to scratch jr. Easy guide for students:

Scratch jr. is a tool that students can easily work with, but it is important if they have any doubt to give them tools so that they can keep working. For this reason below you will find an easy guide to start using scratch jr.

1. Save changes: any time you click on the house you will be able to see your projects but you are also saving any change you have done.

2. The setting: when you will see every character and the scenery.

3. Presentation mode.

4. Grid: to see square on your screen and be able to calculate spaces.

5. Change the setting.

6. Add text.

7. Restore characters: Place each character where they were at the beginning.

8. Start button.

9. Settings of the project: This section also allows you to add more by clicking on the plus button.

10. Information of the project: To see when it was created and how can you share it.

11. Undo and redo.

12. Logical sequences: This is the programming part, the logical sequences must have a start and a end, and you can add different bricks to create a combination of movements or a sequence of them.

13. Programing zone: where the logical sequences are programmed.

14. Bricks: the different bricks you need to create a logical sequence, depending on the colour they have different purposes and categories.

15. Bricks categories: Programmation bricks are divided into categories depending on the colour; yellow is for events, blue for movement, purple for appealing, green for sound, orange to add controls and red to finish the sequences.

16. Character zone: It allows you to create different characters, top add them and also to

delete the ones that you do not want to appear on the screen.

You can download this information directly from the page in Spanish clicking here. You can also find on their page the paint editor guide and the bricks description.

Scratch Junior has also create a guide with challenges, so if you want to use one of them to let the students start by following some easy challenges here you will be able to she them.

Different nutrients and their benefits:

As we said before we are going to work with different nutrients, their benefits the food pyramid and the different types of food. This will take part in between the two scratch activities, as all the knowledge is necessary and important for the last mission to generate the final outcome.

The theory is also important to generate ideas that after can be introduced into the program and that is why it is important to get them to know the program firstly.

Last activity using scratch jr.:

Now that learners know how to work with scratch jr. is time to move on to the final outcome, they have learned now what are the different parts of the food pyramid, they already know what are nutrients and what they give too. So it is their time to create their own application.

Here we have developed one bearing in mind just an idea from the class we were working with during the Masters internship program, but of course this can change depending on the students, their necessities and ideas.

Setting one:

Carbohydrates gives us energy to run, ride a bike and study

This is main story added to the setting but the bricks and the characters added need to be examined, a drawn bread was added to the program by using the paint editor that scratch has.  Also both characters interact, you can see in the logic sequences that the bread disappear once it gets touched by the girl, to give the sensation that she have eaten it.

At the end of the girls logic sequence, you can appreciate that the red button has a picture inside, this is because we have tell the program that once the sequence is finished we want her to move to the following setting.

Setting two:

Fats give us extra energy for when we need it. But - be careful, don’t eat to many or you will become unhealthy and overweight.

Because of the  idea that fats are good but in small quantities, once the girl eats the cheese she will have more energy than what she can burnt and she will start walking slower, as she will get tired and fatter because of it. To to that we have added to logic sequences to the girl, in the first one she is walking as she usually does, because she have eaten a bread, that gives her normal energy, but once she eats the cheese (touch it) with the orange brick we have said the program that we want her to move slowly.

Setting three:

Proteins gives us the energy we need to grow up.

As in the previous settings here the characters interact, but this time once the girl touches the fish we have tell scratch to make her bigger so that she seems to be growing up.

Setting 4:

Minerals and vitamins help us to stay healthy

In this case once the girl eats the fruit she will be able to run as she is a healthy girl. What we have done is exactly the same that we did the second setting but in the opposite way, now she will run instead of going slowly as in the second happen, and what makes it possible is that the program provides us with three different speeds we can change to create this effects.      

     

Conclusion/reflection:

Turning flat activities develop the teacher's brain, he/she has to look for motivating activities to create motivation in students, that is an important skill that students must develop over their process of learning because "Motivated students increase their possibilities of success".

Another aspect to be taken into account, is the fact of working in collaboration with another classmate, we have exchange ideas, concerns and the most important part, we have work together reaching the same goal. Fomenting collaborating in students and teachers is important to create a collaborative environment, where students and teachers offer and receive help between them, establishing a mutual learning through exchanging knowledge.

It has been an enriching activity for me, opening mi mind to other points of view, receiving useful ideas and obtaining a good product from the mixing of two different ways of thinking. After all, as teachers we have to work with another teachers in the school and we do not know them at the beginning.

I hope you like this post, see you soon readers!!