After creating our Oral Communication and Thinking Skills in Kindergarten inventory, our next step was to compare our students to the overall expectations we identified as important.
We looked at all of the students in our 3 classrooms and have identified a small group of 16 students (5 girls and 11 boys) that scored a level 1 or 2 in many areas on the inventory. Thirteen students are in Senior Kindergarten, and 3 are in Junior Kindergarten. From there, we decided to capture an audio recording of our students' communication skills, using two apps; Draw and Tell and Explain Everything.
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To start our project, we began by discussing the needs of students in our classroom and the specific skills our students were missing. As we continued our learning throughout this TLC, we needed a way to measure the growth of our students' oral communication and critical thinking/problem-solving skills. Were there ready-to-use inventories to show what good communication looks like in Kindergarten? What about good problem-solving? We explored several scales such as the Kindergarten Oral Language Assessment Scale (Literacy Place for the Early Years - Kindergarten, Scholastic, 2011), the Overview of Oral Language Developmental Continuum (First Steps Oral Language Developmental Curriculum, 1994), and Critical and Creative Thinking Scale (Minds Wide Open). After learning about what was out there, we needed something that was more relevant and suited to our needs. We decided to build our own skill inventory based on the Ontario Kindergarten Curriculum (2016). We used three overall expectations and several specific expectations within each overall to build our inventory. We added some examples where, in our opinion, an expectation covered a lot of different skills (e.g., 1.6). See below.
The interest for this project, started with our observations of the students in our classrooms. Over the years, we have noticed gaps in many of our students' communication and thinking skills. While many of our students have oral language and thinking skills that enable them to participate actively in our programs, many students do not. In a busy classroom, some students are content to work quietly on their own, rarely expressing their thinking in words. They spend a good portion of their school day observing the learning of their peers, rarely sharing their own ideas and their own learning. Or, if they do share an idea, their ideas lack complexity and depth (e.g., "I like it."). Critical and creative thinking is so important, but is also tied to students' communication skills in so many ways. How can we assess students' thinking if they do not have the oral skills to explain their thinking to us? How can we get these students to engage in activities that build these skills, in a way that is motivating and feels comfortable to them?
We have tried various strategies to coax these students to talk about their learning without success (e.g., sharing circles, taking photographs of their work, adding interest to different learning centres). Our goal is to find a way to entice these students to share their thinking and learning, as we believe they are very capable and have a lot to say. We have noticed that whenever we bring out the iPads in our classrooms, students are attracted to them. The same students who are quiet and withdrawn, tend to get excited and engaged whenever they use an iPad. The idea behind using iPad apps in the classroom, isn't a new one. We have tried different games and activities that allow students to practice various skills (e.g., letter/number tracing apps), yet we have found these apps do not have a strong oral language or critical thinking component to them. The same students that play on their own at one of the learning centres in our classrooms, also trace their letters and numbers alone. We have been looking for something richer. Something that forces students to share their thinking and collaborate with one another. After attending an ETFO Summer Academy course entitled iTeach with iPads in Primary, led by Kristen Wideen and Eric Wideen, we were delighted to learn more about various open-ended/content creation apps. We searched online, and discovered that Kristi Meeuwse was also doing a lot of amazing stuff with iPads in her Kindergarten classroom. The apps these educators are using are different from the apps we have tried before. They possess a strong oral language component to them. In order for students to use these apps successfully, they have to demonstrate problem solving skills, and need to communicate orally to explain their thinking. These are the types of apps we have been looking for. *the app used in the above picture is Chatterpix |
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We are a group of Kindergarten educators in Ontario, Canada. Archives
May 2017
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