Second Grade AIM
Ancient China
Its going to be a great year!
Welcome to AIM 2017-18! After a quick tour of the classroom we jumped right into a brief discussion about goal setting in AIM. Every class at Norton is focusing on teaching students about the importance of setting and reaching goals. Each student wrote a quick reminder on a laminated circle of what their personal goal for AIM was going to be and then they worked in groups to come up with a table goal (such as working as a team etc.,). At the end of the class we wrote our personal goal in the middle of a yellow sticker and drew an emoji face around it depending on whether we reached the goal or are still working on it! We are creating a personal sticker collection in our journal to keep track of our progress!
Project Based Learning in our classroom!
To begin our study of ancient China I have decided to really commit to the PBL (Project Based Learning) model that I had been studying this summer. In PBL’s students take an active role in identifying and resolving a real-world problem or project. Your child will be gathering information, researching from a variety of sources, and asking deeper questions in order to contribute to the problem resolution. Our yearlong project scenario is;
You Live in Ancient China, and decide that you want to create a newspaper. You want it to be successful and for readers to be excited to read your paper. Essential question: How can you, as the creator of an Ancient Chinese newspaper, create a newspaper that is engaging and intriguing to readers?
Once our class was presented with the scenario we immediately created a KNOW/NEED TO KNOW chart to organize our thinking. One glaring thing we decided we needed to know immediately was what actually went into a typical newspaper (I brought in several copies for this purpose). So we put a star on that question to indicate that we were focusing on that first. We broke into groups and started taking apart the elements of the newspaper and writing them on sticky notes to share with the class. We used what we discovered to add to our list of things we need to know more about. Once we had consolidated our list of sticky notes, we decided that our second task was to look at how they actually wrote in ancient China so that we could create a name and logo for our individual newspapers. We logged into our google classroom and had just started reading a few articles when it was time to leave. Next AIM day we will finish learning about calligraphy, come up with our titles for our individual newspaper, and write it using Chinese characters and real calligraphy pens and ink!