About a year ago I wrote about how we might inject our textbooks with a little wonder. Today I played with the idea some more with my grade 6 students.
I took a page from a dusty textbook:
I snapped a photo of some key information:
Then asked my students to think through some questions that they might have:
We thought about the questions, and we thinned out the list. Which questions might you be able to answer with the information in the table?
We took our refined list and got to work.
To consolidate learning we took a look at the textbook page as a whole and compared it to our learning goals:
I can collect and organize discrete or continuous primary data and secondary data and display the data using charts and graphs, including continuous line graphs. (DMP)
I can read, describe, and interpret data, and explain relationships between sets of data. (DMP)
The textbook questions were definitely worth answering. They contained valuable learning and deep curriculum questions; however, a problem is a problem when we see it as a problem. Students will always care more about questions that they own.
