S574 Project Two Shellie Rich March 2008

Project Overview

This pair of lessons involves the creation of written and graphical guides by students. The first, for kindergarteners, requires the development of a chart comparing bats to birds. The second, for second-graders, will culminate in the creation of their own field guide that they will share with a kindergarten class via a school tour. Both lessons address Indiana’s science standards in communication. The kindergarten standard is K.2.2 “Draw pictures and write words to describe objects and experiences.” The second grade standard is 3.2.6 “Make sketches and write descriptions to aid in explaining procedures and ideas.” ("Indiana's Academic Standards- Science") Both lessons support AASL standard 2.1.2 “Organize information so that it is useful.” (Librarians) Additionally, these lessons provide an opportunity for students to improve their visual literacy skills by observing and recording visual elements (Callison and Preddy) and they support students to develop their abilities to discern the more important pieces of information they encounter, a skill that serves children growing up in an information-rich world. Organizing information so that it is useful is a difficult task for novice information scientists. They lack the experience that is needed to know what information will be useful to themselves and they struggle with developing the empathy needed to know what information will be useful to others. They need support to learn to organize information that they take in and that they put out. This support can be in the form of modeling by sharing one’s own thinking process. It can be in the form of facilitating the group’s process of organizing information. It can be by creating worksheets, checklists, or rubrics to support the skills that students need to learn. These lessons use all of these supports. One way that an observer can watch organizational abilities emerge, is by watching as the verbal communications that flow randomly from a small child evolve into the more direct and economical utterances of older children. Second graders are further along this continuum than kindergarteners, but their skills are not fully developed. They have schemata that are more substantial than that of a younger child. This creates a sort of a ready-made filing system that is larger and more nuanced than what a kindergartener may have. They also are better equipped to think of the information needs of others. As we scaffold and model, we teach strategies that will make them independently able to organize information as adults. The second-graders task, in their lesson, is one which develops communication and organizational skills. One of the most important organizational skills in this lesson is the ability to discern what information is important and what isn’t. This is crucial to organizing information on both ends. A mature inquirer can do that kind of discernment proficiently, making sense of input and organizing output for their own use and for the use of others. That is the goal these lessons build toward.

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Kindergarten

Unit Overview

In this unit, students will be working on comparing animals. On the first day, the teacher will read a book about bats and a book about birds to the class. Then, students will pair up and complete a Venn Diagram comparing bats and birds. The Venn Diagram will be an ideal organizer for this sort of activity. See lesson plan for greater detail. On the second day, the students will pair up and look at a picture of a bird, a picture of a squirrel, and a picture of a snake. They will have a chart with columns for skin covering, getting around, size, etc. The students will mark the appropriate boxes for each animal. On the third day, the students will play a game like Taboo, in which they will take turns describing an animal to the others so that they can guess the animal. The teacher will record, on the board, the characteristics that helped the group to guess the animal. The class will discuss the idea that there are certain defining characteristics of animals that let us tell one from another. The teacher will explain to the students that the class will be working on choosing a class pet. Since the teacher will be ultimately responsible for the animal, she does have absolute veto power, but she would like to know what pets the kids are interested in learning more about. The class will brainstorm and the teacher will record characteristics of animals that make good pets, and good classroom pets, specifically. The students will brainstorm various ideas for pets and the teacher will record them. Using their own criteria, the teacher will help the class to select three pets that are appropriate for a classroom. One the fourth day, the students will do inquiry with books, pictures, and a DVD that the teacher has selected. The class will watch the video Paws, Claws, Feathers, and Fins ( Paws, Claws, Feathers & Fins). Students will split up into their groups and begin their inquiries. The teacher will set up three tables, with one for each possible pet. At each table, there will be easy-to-read books about the pets and there will be photographs of the animals in their own habitats and in domestic circumstances. If possible, the teacher will have found pets to borrow for the day so that students can see the actual animals. At the start of the lesson, there will be a brief class meeting. The qualities that the class selected as important to the selection of a class pet will be read again, and the teacher will show the class that she has made a table of contents for each group’s book that reflects the information they included in their book. The groups will be assessed based on participation and the ability to answer questions about these qualities by looking at their books. The class will then hear a short book about each of the three animals, then the students will go to the table with the animal that most interests them. Each student will get a piece of paper and draw their animal, labeling important aspects. For instance, at a guinea pig table, a student might draw the guinea pig in a cage with a hay ball, water dish, and hiding spot, then label those items, since they would be important to keep the animal happy. Students could work together and one could draw a picture of the food the animal needs, while another draws a veterinarian, and a third draws someone cleaning the cage. The goal will be for each group to create a book about their animal so that the class can use the books to help decide what kind of animal would make the best class pet. The teacher will roam and help with spelling and other questions as needed.

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One day five, the teacher will help the students review each animal by completing the checklist they made the day before. Items will include things students suggest and items suggested by the teacher, like: “Is the animal affordable?” and “Will the animal need care every single day?” If the teacher does not like reptiles and amphibians, she might suggest “Does the animal carry germs that can make people sick?” If there are questions on the checklist that the groups can’t answer, they will have a chance to revisit the materials from the day before and complete their field guides. The teacher will also ask if there are new questions or criteria that occurred to students during the process so far. The class will meet as a group again to finish the checklists with the new information added by the groups. The class will discuss the checklists and decide what pet they would choose for their classroom.

Second Grade

Unit Overview

The second grade unit will be about field guides to the world around us. The instructor will explain to students that, later in the lesson, they will be asked to create a field guide to the school but that first the class will learn more about field guides. Students will also create nature journals in which to sketch and label what they learn during the unit and will have opportunities to use several field guides. The first lesson will feature a reading of Stella and Roy Go Camping, (Wolff) a fictional story of two children who go hiking with their mother and find numerous animal tracks, which they look up in a field guide to animal tracks. Then the students will be given examples of animal tracks on paper and field guides in which to look them up. Students will use rulers to measure the tracks and will record their findings in their nature journals. The second lesson will focus on tree leaves, using the booklet Fifty Common Trees of Indiana, (Shaw and University) which contains an interesting flow chart for leaf identification. On day three, the class will explore the types of field guides that exist. The teacher will use Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You (DiTerlizzi and Black) as an example of a fictional field guide. There will also be an architectural field guide, a field guide to an amusement park, and a field guide to collectables available to show students. Students will visit the media center to explore the field guides that are available there, select one, and share why that guide was chosen. From that sharing session, the teacher can facilitate a discussion of what makes a good field guide. On days four and five, students will work building their own field guides. Day six, the students will organize their guide into a tour and send an invitation to one of the kindergarten classrooms to a guided tour, conducted by the second-graders. See lesson plan for more detail.

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Analysis of Differences

The kindergarten students have needs that are different from the second-graders’ in several ways. First, the kindergarteners are not presumed to be competent readers yet. This creates challenges when gathering materials that will be of use to them. Since the teacher will need to read materials to or with most students, and this is time-consuming, the whole class needs to work on some things together to allow teacher time and attention to developing a basic information literacy skill like this one. Kindergarteners will be newer to inquiry and lack the kind of general life experience that makes tasks like prioritizing much easier. Focusing on the task of organizing information provides support to a skill that is essential for future intellectual growth. Another strategy for developing skills that will be useful is for a teacher to share his or her thinking about materials selected for the class. This is a time when a teacher may bring up aspects of a book that influence the teacher’s thinking about it’s reliability (published by a reputable publisher like the Audubon Society or National Wildlife Federation) or it’s level of scholarliness (the animals are drawn as real animals, not furry creatures with human-like faces and wearing clothes.) (Stripling and Hughes-Hassell). Having the opportunity to go back and add on to their work or even to change things, builds reflection and recursion into a small child’s process. These are habits that will be useful to them in future inquiries (Callison and Preddy). By the time students reach second grade, they have developed far greater reading skills than those possessed by kindergarteners. They also have more experience with seeking and evaluating informational resources than younger children do. They will still benefit from a teacher’s thoughts about why she or he chose certain resources, but they can also begin to identify for themselves what makes a resource valuable. The second- graders are more independent workers, too, and thus can handle more time that is not directly supervised. They still need scaffolding and modeling and they can also benefit from hearing the thoughts of their peers. The authenticity of the project, coupled with the relative freedom to choose a subject (within the parameters of the school) help stimulate the thinking of these children, while younger children would be lost without a lot of conferencing with the teacher. Additionally, second-graders can begin to think of the needs of others and can begin to analyze the information the gather and the project they create with an eye toward the audience. Both ages of children benefit from inquiry and from the development of information literacy skills and these lessons both aim to support that development.

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Callison, Daniel , and Leslie Preddy. The Blue Book on Information Age Inquiry, Instruction and Literacy. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2006. DiTerlizzi, Tony, and Holly Black. Arthur Spiderwick's Guide to the Fantastical World around You. New York: Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2005. "Indiana's Academic Standards- Science." Ed. Indiana Department of Education. Teacher Edition ed, 2000. Librarians, American Association of School. "Standards for the 21st-Century Learner." American Library Association, 2007. Paws, Claws, Feathers & Fins. 2001. Inspired Corporation. Shaw, T.E., and Extension Forestry Staff of Purdue University. Fifty Common Trees of Indiana. Indiana Department of Natural Resources Department of Forestry and Conservation, Purdue University, 1981. Stripling, Barbara K., and Sandra Hughes-Hassell. Curriculum Connections through the Library. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2003. Wolff, Ashley. Stella and Roy Go Camping. New York: Dutton Children's Books, 1999.

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