We made it! It is spring break! Please take this time to RELAX & RECHARGE after giving so much to our students and families at PVES. Below you will find some ideas to relax and recharge your teacher soul!
Welcome to week 8 in quarter 3! This week, I would like to investigate critical thinking in grades K-3. When a student uses critical thinking, they are wondering, making connections, and interacting with new vocabulary. Critical thinking is when a thinker analyzes, assesses, and breaks apart a topic to better understand it. This comes easily to some learners but others need more modeling. Below you will find videos, suggested blog posts, and freebies to help support critical thinking in your classroom.
Watch this video from Oxford Discover: How to use Critical Thinking
How to improve critical thinking?
Let's watch this video from:
TedED & Samantha Agoos.
Heidi's Songs has some very simple ways to increase critical thinking with young learners.
Click the image to visit her site:
More ideas for the classroom:
Mystery Box
Use a mystery box to introduce new ideas for the classroom & support inferencing!
A Mystery Box is a great way to introduce a science concept or a theme. Students could even create their own mystery boxes for research projects. I also like to use this idea to help students learn to make inferences. Show them the contents of the box and encourage them to make inferences about the connections between the objects.
Read more about:
The Inspired Apple
Teach problem-solving with wordless videos!
Wordless picture books and videos are perfect for getting the brain thinking and analyzing.
Visit Speech is Beautiful for some awesome videos to get your students critically thinking!
Learn to add depth and complexity to your lessons by visiting Melissa over at Teacher Thrive.
Grab her FREE Critical Thining Cheat Sheets and bookmarks.
Did you know you have access to an online science textbook on Discovery ED? Well, you do and it is awesome! Check out this video below. It walks you through all DE has to offer within their textbook.
Science can easily be integrated into your reading lessons through balanced literacy. Nonfiction leads itself to shared reading and close reading activities. Check out how Mrs. Richardson's class makes this happen over oh the blog!
Don't forget all the great options for integration that are offered on RazKids and Reading A to Z! You can assign texts for students & use projectiable books. Epic Books is another great site to visit. You can create collections on topics for your students to read on their own or use the book on the smartboard for whole group. Don't forget that you can create quizzes to help support comprehension!
Using a fiction book study to lead into a nonfiction unit of study is a great way to build background knowledge to support connections and engagement. Thundercake by Patricia Pollacco is a great book to introduce a weather unit!
Head into Epic and build a collection of book on thunderstorms!
Jump into your DE Science Textbook!
Students can also go into DE Board Builder and create a board all about thunderstorms to demonstrate what they have learned.
Your budding scientists can participate in science experiments like how to track a storm.
In the fiction book, the characters count in between lightning & thunder to determine the location of the storm. Students could use a simple lamp and the sheet below!
They can watch a video on DE for how to track a storm.
See how science, reading, and art can be integrated too!
