In a joint outdoor education project with three other classes (about 85 students), Aboriginal elders shared their knowledge of traditional medicines based on local plants. Students then had the opportunity to apply this knowledge to develop their own/creative medicines. These girls were very engaged in this task.
A student was reluctant to throw away or even recycle plastic plant tags because she remembered that much earlier in the year, the class had been talking about reusing. So she suggested that everyone in the class use them as bookmarks.
As part of a science unit on fruits and vegetables and the different kinds of plants that produce them, the teacher presented a slide show on the work of Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo who created art works based on fruits and vegetables. She had the students identify the fruits and vegetables Arcimboldo used in his work. She then had students go to a fruit and vegetable table she had prepared for inspiration for their own works.
After a lesson based on the story, Not a Stick, the class had a discussion about the one student’s project that was both innovative and useful (the fire maker). The teacher then created an integrated Science and creative thinking task around the topic of magnets. After giving students some time to read about and experiment with magnets, the teacher presented them with the challenge, “What can you create using a magnet?”
Over the course of the year, students this class had opportunities to develop and share their mathematical thinking and strategies in response to different problems.
A student used a hundreds chart to solve an addition problem and shared his strategy with the class.
This lesson was based on the wordless picture book Chalk by Bill Thomas. In the story, everything that the children draw with magic chalk comes to life including a gigantic dinosaur. After reading the story, each child was given a “magic” piece of chalk and asked, “What stories will come to life when your chalk meets black paper?” After drawing their stories, each child had a turn to orally explain what their magic chalk had created. This student imagined that storybook heroes come to life and save her when she’s in trouble.
After reading the book Not a Box by Antoinette Portis, a class discussed all the different things a box could be. Students were given a choice of paper squares in different sizes, patterns, and colours that they could glue to a page and make into something else. The result became a class book.
A child decided to use the pantry in the kitchen centre as a parkade for all the toy cars and trucks from another centre. He combined other people’s ideas about play centres to create something new, and made it work. His idea was fun because it expanded the play possibilities for him and his friends within existing resources.
Students were given time for free exploration with the tool SMART notebook, and allowed to create anything they chose. This girl selected something important to her (her pink stuffy “Minnie”), took her own photo of her with Minnie, reversing the camera and importing the photo into the program, created a border and coloured it using the tools in the app, all independently. She was very proud of what she created and asked to put it on the SMARTboard to show her classmates.
In this storybook workshop, children generated ideas by choosing a provocation that had been set out by the teacher. Provocations for this lesson included art studio with watercolours, play dough, building blocks, plastic animals and loose parts (beads, empty spools), and collections of other artifacts. The children built, played, and made the story come alive in their actions and words.