Lessons Learned

Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness

Tag: Grade 2

PYP-ICL Exemplar and Personalized Higher Edu

PYP Teachers

PYP teachers tell their story of a inquiry, collaboration and ICL integration. Look to watch the video.

Check out an excellent Washington Post article on MOOCs and personalized higher edu. The timing of our Ed Tech Co-Op podcast team could not be better. We will soon be posting another episode with Jeff Nugent, Director of Academic Technologies at Colgate University as we speak to his work with edX.

Communicating Understanding and Documenting Student Learning

screencast

Our First and Second Graders recently completed projects using ScreenChomp to create screencasts on their iPads. The learning goal for the students was to reflect to communicate their responses to the essential questions from the units of inquiry they were completing. A big challenge was representing their thinking about their learning visually and communicating their answers to the questions in their second language (French, Spanish, or Dutch).

The First Graders responded to the following questions from the People Around the World unit.

  • What is my daily life like?
  • How is my life similar to the lives of children in other countries?
  • How is my life different from the lives of children in other countries?

The Second Graders responded to the following questions from the Weather unit.

  • What is the weather?
  • What makes the weather change?
  • How does weather affect people’s lives?

Here is an example of one student’s screencast.

Helping Our Parents Build Understanding

2nd Grade

How do your teachers help their parents better understand the classroom curriculum? How in-depth do they go?

The screenshot above is from a newsletter our second-grade teachers recently emailed their parents. The newsletter also contains curriculum sections on language, math, specialist classes, and tips for supporting learning at home. I like how the teachers start with the big idea/concept for the unit, putting it front and center. Whether you are a PYP or a school that uses the Understanding by Design approach to curriculum development, helping students learn concepts is where we start our unit design process.

I also like how the teachers guide the parents to better understand our PYP curriculum by building their understanding of how concepts, transdisciplinary skills, and actions drive our students’ learning. The units of inquiry, in this case, the Character Connections unit, connect portions of the reading, writing, social studies, science, math, and language studies curricula into each unit. The students pursue and build their understanding around teacher-provided questions and ones that they also come up with.

We know that parents have their school experiences to draw from as they develop their expectations for what should happen in their child’s classroom. When we go beyond the basics of teaching reading, writing, etc., to teach concepts, inquiry, and transdisciplinary skills, sometimes parents are at a loss to understand what is happening in the curriculum. 

This makes it doubly important to have parent coffees. These rich classroom websites include videos of learning activities and other opportunities in detailed newsletters to teach parents about the complexities and rewards of going beyond what they perhaps experienced in their elementary education.

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