Tuesday, March 22, 2011

The Spark has become a Fire!!!

Day 2 of dream school.  Yesterday students discovered the perimeter and area of our school in meters.  We used existing maps to talk about future possibilities.  Today we pretended that the school was to be torn down, but we had to build a new school, with identical perimeter on the current site.  What students designed for the inside of their school was up to them.

Students had the task of taking yesterday's measurements and re-drawing the perimeter of the school to scale.  Scale can be very confusing, however since we had purpose, student's were fully engaged.  My brief assessment showed that all students were capable of drawing large objects to scale.  But that wasn't the fire, that was the spark.

The fire turned out to be the conversations about what to put inside.  So many great, and many unrealistic ideas were said, but who am I to judge?  We decided that this conversation would be ongoing and needed to be recorded.  Yesterday we opened up Edmodo accounts.  So, we created a new small group dedicated to sharing ideas about our new school designs.  This afternoon those ideas will start showing up so that our conversations will continue.

I am uploading one student's current draft.  They are in the process of finalizing their plan.  They have chosen to create and share using Google Docs.

I LOVE MY JOB!  I love how flammable these kids have been.

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