Meaningful Learning

I believe a vital component to effective teaching and learning is effective lesson planning.  I work hard to integrate learning across the curriculum in a way that gives students a variety of experiences to interact with new knowledge.  Let’s face it, learning is unique to an individual and their personal interests and backgrounds. I aim to get them excited, curious, and foster a love of learning about everything.

Since the start of my career in teaching, I have used the framework of  “Blooms Taxonomy,”  and “Understanding by Design” as part of my personal lesson design process.  I determine what I want my students to know in the end and then begin building a unit to get there.  This typically starts with teacher-centered instruction and ends with student-centered instruction.

If you pop into my room you will regularly see active, hands-on exploration and cooperative learning.  You will hear students sharing ideas freely with each other and myself.  You will feel inspired to stay and see what we do next!

Below is an example of meaningful learning connected to the standards.

What’s the “Matter” with the Titanic?

My students had a great deal of interest on the history of the Titanic so I decided to create an integrated unit during our study of Matter in second grade.

To begin, they immersed themselves in the study of boats.  Using books to do their research they strengthened their reading skills through lessons on non-fiction text features.   They then created their own posters with diagrams, labels, captions, and illustrations.

Now it was time to put their new knowledge to work. I challenged them to build a boat that could hold the most weight without sinking. We explored the properties of different materials during our study of Solids, Liquids, and Gases.  I provided all sorts of materials  for them to choose from.

 

Time to test and make any changes to our boats before the challenge.

Finally it was time to determine which boat was the most seaworthy.

We charted our data for each boat.

The students then ordered the boats from least to greatest.

Now it was time to get to work on learning all about the history of the Titanic.  We read tons of books, both fiction and non-fiction about the titanic.  The children became fascinated with the timeline of events from the moment it hit the iceberg to the moment it the Carpathia came to rescue the survivors.  We decided to create a timeline of events to present our research.  Each group took a scene of that fateful night and wrote and illustrated what happened.

This was our finished product.