Our group agreements
Now that we are in our official African Animal group and we know our role, now it is time to set up some agreements for how we are going to work together. We know no one is leaving or changing groups, so we have to be able to get a long and work with the people that we have been assigned to be with. One student last week asked me, "is this our real group?" I responded with a "yes" and they promptly said, "well, this isn't going to work!" I then promptly said, "we are going to have to make it work" :) These group agreements are a great place to start! We will be re-visiting these agreements and adding too them as we see fit.
Finding facts and answering our questions about animals!
After setting the expectations, students will start generating questions they want to know about their animals and then work together to research these questions and write fact drafts for their books. Once groups have generated lots of fact page drafts and feel like experts, they will sort these facts into chapters. When we have all of the pages drafted, we will edit them for readability, marking them up with purple pens and making them sloppy before using them to write our final drafts and publish our books. This editing process will be an important step in creating our books. If we want other people to learn from our books, they have to be able to read our writing. This "research process" is something that we will keep going back to. Each group will be working at their own pace and will be at different points during the process from week to week. Such a fun and chaotic time that is full of great learning! |