Unit board in practice

I'm into the second unit now and I've been adapting the unit board along the way to make it meaningful and engage the students in the unit's development.

Here are some things that are working:

Creating the board

Student examples of the Approaches to Learning

The students are responsible for creating the flags for the: transdisciplinary theme, unit title, lines of inquiry, teacher questions, and approaches to learning. They explain them to the class and they match the lines of inquiry to the teacher questions.  When we're reviewing what we're learning, the student responsible for creating the flag explains it. This responsibility has given them more ownership in the unit. As it is the second unit, they are beginning to take it as a habit now.

Drafts of Central Ideas, Lines of Inquiry and Teacher Questions

Writing the Central Idea

In Unit 1,  Students wrote their drafts of the central idea on post it notes.They revised each draft once, thus three separate post it notes. By the end of the unit they were able to coordinate their individual central idea drafts to write one clear idea of what we had studied in our unit.
The classes final central idea was "We can experiment with microorganisms, living or by preventing, to prepare food. It was much clearer than the original: People can use a variety of methods to preserve food.

 The post it notes worked well, but they kept falling off of the cloud.
In unit two I modified it so that each student has a star hanging from the cloud. Now they can add revise the stars and add more, seeing how their understanding of the central idea has grown over the course of the unit. I also like the visual metaphor that their drafts are as important as stars.
 

Students questions. 

I have modified how and when I query for student questions. I have pushed it back into week 2-3 of the unit, so that they have time to gain some background knowledge to ask deep questions. This has been paying off for me. In the past I gained shallow questions like how many kinds of government are there? Who makes governments? This year I received deeper questions like are there any countries without a government? How do governments help people in war? What were the first forms of government?

I have been using thinking routines to develop their questioning skills. We have used the Think Puzzle Explore for the first two units. In the first unit we completed it as a class. In the second unit they completed it in pairs.

The Unit Book

Our unit 1 pages for the unit book

During the summative assessment for unit 1 students took the unit board apart and turned it into a book. Last year students used the unit board book when they were stuck creating their lines of inquiry or choosing Approaches to Learning when they developed their own unit plan for the exhibition.

 

 

 

 

Thing that I've changed

Key Concepts Dice

I have worked with the students to create Key Concepts dice. The students analyze what they know about the key concept and use that to develop 5 questions that we write on 5 sides of the die. When we're having conversations we throw the dice to keep the conversation going.

Students work

Student work for tuning in and finding out

I was reading a post on unit boards on a facebook group and a friend posted about a lack of student work on unit boards. It had me looking at my unit board and realizing that unit examples were done in my hand. This was in part because most of our work was done in laboratory and I couldn't exactly put our pickles or jerky on the board ;) Their lab notes and research were written in their notebooks.
But I took her comment to heart.
In this unit I have taken care to develop activities that show their learning and can be posted on the board to track our progress in the inquiry cycle.

Our Monarchs wrote a constitution for our government unit.