Reading Reflection 9

One method of understanding students’ prior knowledge is to do some type of activity that you can use to determine how much a students has learned either inside another classroom or out in the world. One activity that you can do with your students to get their prior knowledge is K-W-L which stands for know, want to know and what you learned. This will show you not only how much they already but what they have some ideas about and what they do not. 

The importance of establishing anchors for a project is to have a sense of a starting point for students and how far that they have to work in order to meet their learning goal. It is important to realize that each student will have different anchors, for example one student who may be dyslexic needs to have an anchor of taking maybe 2 hours to type a paper where as a general ed student may take thirty minutes to type the paper. 

One way to asses your students on what they learned during projects is to have the students create a comic book where they use specific quotes and descriptions from a specific book they are reading. Another is having your students create their own book using specific idioms that they had been blogging about, then have the students share these books with one another. One other way to asses your students is have them put together a portfolio about what they are learning and explain to them that experts in these fields will be looking over their portfolios. Then have the experts help you grade them and give the students feedback on how they could improve. The last example in this book is to enter the students work for publication. This will encourage the students to do a better job, therefore making their stories reflect more of what they learned. 

One way that I am going to use these concepts in my project is to have the students fill out a K-W-L explaining what they already know about weather, some different things that they want to know and when finished have the students share what they actually learned from the project. Another concept I am going to use is the different ways to asses students on what they learned. I am going to asses the students based on their weather channel, which will include things that they learned like how to tell temperature/predict the temperature, how to give the report itself and how to read a weather map.