Bio: Kasia is a K-8th Grade STEM Educator at Mariano Azuela Elementary School in Chicago, IL. She is ready to begin her 5th year teaching. In her classroom, students get to tinker with variety of contents. In K-5 grade classrooms students work on coding and creating using engineering design process. In middle grades, students engage in PLTW curriculum, as well as in Apple Swift Playground programming.
My amazing teaching moment is a lesson students experience on the first day of my class. I start the year with high expectations that everyday they will be challenged to problem solve, think, collaborate, and learn from each other.
As students come into my classroom, they sit down in groups of 4-5 people. Each group is given a bag with puzzles and a picture of the puzzle they will be creating. Depending on a grade level, the number of pieces increases or decreases. This activity can be universally applied to any age. I only tell students few things: “Your group’s puzzle needs to be completed” ,”All of the groups need to finish their puzzles in order to succeed”, “I cannot answer any questions.”. The last direction get’s tested out few times throughout the activity, as I pretend I am not in the classroom. I set the stopwatch, and I tell the students to begin working. In the first few minutes, I get to observe my learners and get to know them a lot thought such a simple task. This activity let’s me understand who are the “group leaders”, “quiet ones” and those in between. What students don’t know is that I have removed 3 pieces of puzzles from each bag before class and put them in another group’s bag. It is interesting to see how fast some of them realize it and go to another group to ask whether they have their missing pieces or if those extra pieces are somebody else’s. Furthermore, I love to watch when one group completes their work and remembers that they need to help others to finish. In all of my classes, this activity does not take more than 20 minutes to complete everyone’s puzzles.
After this assignment, we discuss how they felt given those limited directions, and when they completed their own puzzles. We discuss the sense of belonging and how good it feels to help others in order to complete a bigger task. This is the moment in my classroom when students start understanding that everything that we will be doing is collaborative and that they themselves, are a bigger source of knowledge to each other than just me, myself teaching.
Hashtags: #collaboration, #teamwork, #STEM, #firstday, #challenge #puzzles #icebreaker, #wheredoesthispiecego
My amazing teaching moment is a lesson students experience on the first day of my class. I start the year with high expectations that everyday they will be challenged to problem solve, think, collaborate, and learn from each other.
As students come into my classroom, they sit down in groups of 4-5 people. Each group is given a bag with puzzles and a picture of the puzzle they will be creating. Depending on a grade level, the number of pieces increases or decreases. This activity can be universally applied to any age. I only tell students few things: “Your group’s puzzle needs to be completed” ,”All of the groups need to finish their puzzles in order to succeed”, “I cannot answer any questions.”. The last direction get’s tested out few times throughout the activity, as I pretend I am not in the classroom. I set the stopwatch, and I tell the students to begin working. In the first few minutes, I get to observe my learners and get to know them a lot thought such a simple task. This activity let’s me understand who are the “group leaders”, “quiet ones” and those in between. What students don’t know is that I have removed 3 pieces of puzzles from each bag before class and put them in another group’s bag. It is interesting to see how fast some of them realize it and go to another group to ask whether they have their missing pieces or if those extra pieces are somebody else’s. Furthermore, I love to watch when one group completes their work and remembers that they need to help others to finish. In all of my classes, this activity does not take more than 20 minutes to complete everyone’s puzzles.
After this assignment, we discuss how they felt given those limited directions, and when they completed their own puzzles. We discuss the sense of belonging and how good it feels to help others in order to complete a bigger task. This is the moment in my classroom when students start understanding that everything that we will be doing is collaborative and that they themselves, are a bigger source of knowledge to each other than just me, myself teaching.
Hashtags: #collaboration, #teamwork, #STEM, #firstday, #challenge #puzzles #icebreaker, #wheredoesthispiecego