When learning is playful

St. Joseph's School | 5th Grade | Language Arts | Present: 24 students, teacher and myself | 2 hours field experience including reflection time

Background

I spent this morning observing a masterful teacher do her magic with a group of 25, 5th graders at St. Joseph's private school. The lesson was focused on descriptive writing, writing that doesn't 'tell', it instead 'shows'. The methods I got to witness were impressive.

Key Observations and Methods

Golden Line

The class has been working on writing good sentences, what the teacher calls the Golden Line. The teacher laid out the characteristics of a Golden Line to recap the work they had done so far. Then, they got into a game.

For a moment I want to digress. This teacher makes all learning playful. Her energy, how she moves, how she looks at her students, how she calls on them, it all feels like it is part of a sport. She even calls them 'team'. The students respond to her. This class of 25 was engaged and present with her the WHOLE time. She makes it so and they respond. Wow!

Back to the Golden line.

The teacher handed out a sheet to each row with each person in the row having a role in creating the Golden Line — writing down a noun, an adjective, an adverb, a verb and so on that would make up the sentence. To play the game, she started out by showing the class a picture. Their sentence had to be about the picture. Then, she got them going. Each person in the row wrote a part of speech that would contribute to the sentence and then passed the paper along to their teammate. In the end, they all gathered and did some word-smithing to create the sentence. It worked well! Once done, they shared their sentences with the class. The teacher led them through evaluations of what made the sentence a Golden line and what didn't.

I was struck by how such a fun and engaging game could help convey some important concepts in writing. It was lovely to see each student participating. It was refreshing to hear the energy and the buzz in the room as the students did word-smithing. I imagine that if the teacher had more time, she would engaged the students even more in the evaluation of the sentences. She seemed to lead that part all by herself. With more student involvement, they will learn to evaluate their own writing. I have come to appreciate the power of self-assessment.

Descriptive Writing Brainstorm

In this next game, each student got a picture. The pictures were unique and the teacher handed them out keeping each child in mind. I was moved by her thoughtfulness in working so hard to make this exercise meaningful to each individual child. She then handed out a paper to each child with the five senses on it. The students were then asked to see their picture and capture descriptive words that connected the senses to the picture. For example, on seeing the picture of a beach, what sounds do you hear and what words might capture those sounds? What do you taste and what words might capture those tastes and so on. Once done with a few minutes of individual work, the teacher picked one student's work to share in the class as an example. The class worked together to find even more descriptive words to describe the beach scene in the picture.

This was a hard exercise. I realized how hard it can be to find truly descriptive words, ones that 'show' and not just 'tell'. The students thought long and hard about these words but they were not coming forth as easily until they had a few gos at the exercise. I wonder what might have made this exercise easier for students. What if they were all given a set of descriptive words already and they chose the ones that worked best for describing their pictures? Or, is it critical they do this from memory? When we write in life, can we not have access to a thesaurus and other resources? Must we do it from memory or must each word in the sentence be an act of creativity? I also wonder if the exercise would have been easier if the students had watched a video instead of seeing a picture. Moving pictures are more powerful than still pictures. Of course a video couldn't have been unique to each student. All this said, this too was a very engaging and fun way for students to learn about writing descriptive sentences.

Takeaway(s)

Learning can be fun and this teacher not only belives it but practices it every step of the way. Her students engage with her and enjoy being there. I also believe they learn. Sometimes I wonder what such a masterful teacher would be able to do in an environment that doesn't have a pre-defined curriculum. Perhaps I should ask her that …