I hate the KWL. I’m sorry if you’re an enormous fan of it, however any variation of it, I simply hate. I don’t know why I detest it a lot, however I do. I believe it was as a result of once I first started school, it was the favored graphic organizer that everybody was doing of their classroom. So, once I was launched to the R.A.N. Chart some years later – a chart that was at first launched as an adaptation of the KWL – you possibly can think about my ideas. Nevertheless, I attempted to be open-minded. Possibly this could be a greater model of the already thousands and thousands of them on the market. And, surprisingly, it was.
Just lately, I posted about how I obtained my college students actively concerned throughout our Animal Classification Science Unit by making questions. Final week, we had been discussing the 5 courses of vertebrates, and I believed this could be the right time to make use of Tony Stead’s R.A.N. (Studying and Analyzing Nonfiction) Chart. Since I had 5 courses of vertebrates to cowl, I started by breaking my college students up into teams primarily based on the jigsaw methodology. Every member within the group would study one of many 5 courses and report again to their group.
First, I had college students start by writing what they suppose they learn about their assigned class – not what they know, however what they THINK they know. (I like this higher, as a result of how usually do youngsters say they know one thing if you find yourself gathering solutions for a KWL chart, and you’ll’t put it up there as a result of it’s false data? I hated this as a result of I used to be at all times apprehensive somebody would take that one factor they heard somebody “know” and begin to imagine it as so.) They wrote these on sticky notes and positioned them on one huge chart that I had created on butcher paper. Additionally they wrote it on their very own private charts.
Second, I supplied college students with a nonfiction studying passage that I had written (and is present in my animal classification unit) about their explicit class. As college students are studying, they should pay attention to whether or not the knowledge they wrote within the first column that they considered true was confirmed (second column) or not. If not, they needed to attend to any misconceptions they’d and write it within the fourth column.
Subsequent, I had my college students learn it once more, and this time they needed to write down any new data that they realized and place it within the new data column.
Lastly, on the finish, they wrote down any questions or issues that they nonetheless puzzled about and positioned these within the closing column.
We continued to do that on each sticky notes for our huge class chart and on our personal particular person charts (we accomplished all the particular person charts over time with all 5 courses). Then, we mentioned every column, particularly the misconceptions. We additionally mentioned how we might discover out the solutions to our questions and the issues we puzzled about.
