I am linking up with the awesome Greg from Kindergarten Smorgasboard and Kelly from "From Kindergarten With Love" (ah, two froms... not sure what to do with that, my inner OCD is going crazy, but I am going with it!)
Chapter 5 focuses on teaching nonfiction concepts though the use of schema charts. These are so much better than the KWL charts that I used to use. I loved how Debbie (I feel like I know her now!) breaks down how she uses a schema chart in the classroom by taking us through a lesson on sharks.
I have done schema charts in the past, but I always felt like I was missing something. A large majority of my students do not have strong background knowledge. I struggled with trying to pull that out into a schema chart that we could use for teaching. As I was reading this chapter, I kept saying to myself, "Aha! I get it now!"
I love how she structured her file folder chart:
Schema- what we think we know.
New learning- where we will put our new information.
Misconceptions- information that we thought was true, but our new learning taught us that it was not. Questions we still have (for research)
I think in the beginning there will need to be a large amount of teacher think-aloud for my class. I always need to remember that this is a journey... a process. I am teaching my kiddos how to learn new information. How to bridge their background knowledge (whatever that might be) with new learning. It will build over time. And that is where we go back to the previous chapter and think about how we talk to our kiddos and help them to put their thinking on display. This is where I am going to go back to this cheat sheet:
You can find this in my last post. {here}
Happy Teaching,
