Schema

Today we introduced the class to our second thinking strategy...schema.  Schema is the background knowledge that students bring to a book that they are reading.  To start I had the students create a T-Chart in their reader's notebooks.  On one side of the T-Chart students got one minute to write as much as they could about Kings Island.  As you can imagine the students quickly filled this side with all the different things they knew about Kings Island.  On the right side of the T-Chart the students were asked to write down everything they knew about sabermetrics.  The class struggled on this side.  Sabermetrics is the statistical analysis of baseball data.  It was clear the class had a large amount of schema for Kings Island but not much for sabermetrics.

Then I asked the students to think about if I handed them two articles to read (one about Kings Island and one about sabermetrics) and they had to decide which would be easier to read.  It was amazing to hear why they thought the article about Kings Island would be a much easier to read.  We are going to continue to talk about how to unlock our schema when we read and what to do when we do not have schema for the rest of this week.  So if you hear the word schema, it just means the stuff you know before you read.

We also spent more time with the claim that we made yesterday.  If you don't remember, the students had to make a claim about whether or not coming back to school was a good or bad time of year.  Since we had already made a claim we needed to collect evidence or reasons to support their claim.  We did this today by having the class create a pro/con list.  I love a good pro/con list.

The students did an amazing job on this pro/con list.  Each student had to create a post-it note with one pro about coming back to school and one con.  We also asked the students to try and jazz up their writing.  I was blown away.  I am hoping tomorrow to get a few more close-ups of the excellent examples of writing.  

When we were done with the list students picked three pieces of evidence that they were going to use to support their claim.  Many of the students used our post-it notes to find their evidence.  Tomorrow I am going to write my claim about going back to school and then the classes will get their first shot at writing their own claim.  

I know I did not share about conversation calendars tonight but I promise I will get to them tomorrow.  Hope you are having a great week!!

Almost forgot to show you the class poem we made last week about summer.  We used our summer 3-in-3's to get these ideas.