JoAnna has finished her first report for school. She was to choose an animal to learn about. Then she had a seven page 'book' to fill out. The first page was "It looks like...". Honestly one of the hardest parts for us was trying to condense the cool stuff we were learning into three Kindergarten sized lines. We revised each page at least once. The most exciting part for me as "The Mom" was that Jo was a really good sport about the whole thing. Her teacher asked that they work on one page a day as they had a week to finish the whole thing. We did that, and on top of that we had other goals for the day that would go into the finished product. Jo was really great about letting me teach her. (Not always the case.) And I had a great time showing her some of the resources that there are all around her. Here are some things she got to try out:
1. Using the library computer to look up a subject.
2. There is actually an order to how books are lined up on the shelf and we found what we were looking for right where the computer said it would be!
3. Skimming through a book in the library can help you narrow down which ones to check out. You don't have to read every book, or check out every book.
4. How to scan pictures onto the computer.
5. How to crop, rotate, edit a picture to get just what you want.
6. Then, due to quirks of functioning scanners and printers not being on the same computer that week, she got to help me email the pictures back to myself. She made sure we got ALL of them!
7. After checking email on another printer handy computer, we printed!
8. Then came her expertise. She cut out and glued on the pictures.
9. She also added some classy finishing touches by tracing all the words in black marker and adding borders around her pictures.
Okay, so, you all may be thinking Becca went overboard, but I assure you I really stepped back and let her go. I was really excited at how excited she was about it all. There wasn't a single step that she didn't have a hand in and learn something from. Even on the computer parts. And many steps she conquered single handedly. I have no idea what the teacher had in mind when she sent this assignment home, but one thing's for sure. JoAnna owned this project. She
took responsibility and made it her own. What more can a parent ask?
Allergy Shots
10 years ago
1 comments:
I was really impressed to see some of this in action myself ... I work with BYU Field Studies right now, and one of the main things we try to do with our students is to get them to own the research projects they do in other cultures. This is hard to accomplish because our educational system, for the most part, from kindergarten through the university, is about doing what the teacher tells you to do. But once people have the responsibility and the freedom to explore something that interests them, they tend to work a lot harder on it and learn a lot more.
Jo's lucky to have a mother who is willing to let an almost-six-year-old take the reigns of her own education and accomplish something amazing.
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