Young Children - March 2008 - (Page 16) When the children arrive, they can begin to put their notes from the week in order, reading them and deciding what to report in the newspaper. Put the newspaper together on Fridays On Fridays before the children enter the classroom, place the blank sections (already cut) for their particular jobs on their desks. When the children arrive, they can begin to put their notes from the week in order, reading them and deciding what to report in the newspaper. For example, if the reporting job was “Attendance,” the child can look back through the notebook to see how many children were at school each day and then analyze the information, figuring out which day had the most children and which had the least. For other jobs, such as “A book to recommend” or “A helping moment,” the children can review their notes and select the most important news to report. Because this is a community publication, the children do not write their names on the individual reports as bylines. It’s not a problem if some of the jobs involve concepts that are not yet covered in the curriculum. The children are likely to help each other. Tracie knew how to use the Base-10 blocks to show place value before we had covered this concept in class. She helped her classmates use that concept to report on “Days in school.” An Approach Grounded in Research: The Curriculum Consultant’s Perspective As a curriculum consultant, I like to begin the curriculum renewal process by sharing the latest research findings with the curriculum committee. The committee’s decision to build both the science and social studies curriculum around conceptual themes emerged from our creative interpretation of the rich research findings synthesized in the National Research Council report How People Learn (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking 1999). Our decision was based on the growing consensus about how people learn, informed by a variety of fields including cognition, child development, and brain functioning. As reported in How People Learn, knowing facts is not enough; facts and ideas become usable knowledge when learners connect and organize them in meaningful ways around unifying concepts (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking 1999). The curriculum committee identified those concepts for both science and social studies units based upon our understanding of the research findings. At the first grade level, we identified the unifying concept in science of “change over time.” The committee planned the curriculum sequence so children could actively investigate this theme in the contexts of habitats, solids and liquids, and weather and seasons. In social studies we designed the curriculum so the children could explore concepts of belonging, roles and responsibilities, and people who make a difference— in school, in their families, and in the world around them. Laurie and I decided to take the unifying themes one step further by creating a classroom environment where children worked on an authentic task as news reporters. While the children in the class investigated the curriculum themes, they were also constructing a firsthand understanding of roles and responsibilities as members of a publishing team and becoming more aware of their own personal roles within the community. When we set out to create this kind of learning environment, we hoped the sense of belonging (Maniates, Doerr, & Golden 2001) would naturally emerge as the learners discussed their findings with each other. Each member of the class would take his or her responsibility seriously and understand that everyone has a critical role on the publishing team. In addition, a section of the newspaper focuses on those who take on responsibilities too—individuals in the greater community who make a difference. We were very interested in helping learners connect with concepts in meaningful ways that would foster the building of deep connections. For example, we wanted the children to be the “owners and operators” (Darling-Hammond & Bransford 2005, 57) of their brains. They would apply metacognitive approaches (thinking about their own thinking) while actively pursuing evidence across different contexts. We based this decision on research findings as well, considering the significance of children taking control of their own learning (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking 1999). Laurie and I wanted to encourage the children to provide evidence to support their observations, and we designed the newspaper to support learners in acquiring skills of reasoning based on observation and logical analysis of evidence. As curriculum consultant and classroom teacher, we could not have been happier when our vision came to fruition. The careful integration of conceptual themes with an authentic task—creating a newspaper—offered an ideal learning environment. The class newspaper has given us an exciting new way to actively engage children in inquiry across all areas of the curriculum. 16 Young Children • March 2008
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