Constructivist Approach to Learning

                                                                Thompson =)

In class today we discussed the importance of putting students in charge of their own learning to make the learning more meaningful. When students are looking for the answers themselves, the information will stick a lot more than if they learned all the facts from a lecture. It also means the teacher is working with each student more individually. Rather than putting students in Lit Circle or Guided Reading groups, the students are reading a book perfect for their instructional level and the learning that goes along with it is catered for their specific needs.  The learning that occurs should be in the student's Zone of Proximal Development.

We saw examples of how to use anchored instruction and participated in an example as well. An example I think is great is the Literature Units to Foster Critical Thinking by Sunda. In this example, the students read a book and create the unit to go along with the book. They prepare the unit as if they were preparing questions, vocabulary words and end of the book projects for the next year's class to use. We also participated in  a activity where we had to gather facts to reveal the true identity of a tall tale character called Wandering Willie. (Shown above) We used clues given on a power point to find Willie's height, weight, color of shirt, color of socks and his real name, then we drew our findings using Kid Pix.

Below is a funny story my group and I wrote using Titan Pad. What a neat way to for students to collaborate their ideas!
        I decided to go for an evening stroll. I walked about three blocks when I felt ...peculiar. Someone was following me, so I started to run. It was a clown. A big scary clown. With face paint, and dumbo shoes. He also had a red squeaking nose. Once he realized I noticed he was following me, he started chasing after me and squirting me with his water gun.My grandma's house wasn't far down the road, so I began sprinting to her house and hoped that she would be home to help me. I think the clown had a gun. She wasn't home, so I ran and hid in the dog house. It smelled very disgusting and made me want to vomit, but I composed myself and waited for him to walk by. All of a sudden 5 more clowns came out of the shadows and chased me down.All of a sudden I remembered it was bring a weapon to school day and I had a knife in my book bag! I turned around and aimed at one of the clowns. It hit him in the leg and he fell to the ground. I took the rest of the clones down with some of my awesome ninja moves. I pulled off the clown mask to see it was my teacher screaming, "I would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those dang kids!" It took me a moment to realize I was in a Scooby-Doo episode. Whoops, jokes on me.