Choose one of the following: Consider a lesson plan you might use. Which metacognitive skills/abilities are involved as students gain facility/knowledge in this domain? OR Think of an activity or lesson component that explicitly teaches one or more metacognitive and one or more problem solving skills.
Throughout my classes at UT in regards to Early Childhood Education, I think I could reflect on many activities or lesson components that explicitly teaches metacognitive or problem solving skills. For this blog post however, I will highlight one that can encompass both!
One activity that I do almost on a daily basis, whether I am in a Kindergarten classroom (for my pre-internship) or at work in the ELC (preschool) is reading aloud. Not only can you expose children to a great book, you can also exercise their metacognition skills. Before you read the book you can present the front cover and ask them to make a prediction or ask if they know anything about what the book is about (judging again, but the front cover). As you go along in the book, you can ask different questions about their predictions or their thoughts and comments about what they know and evoke conversation about this. Lastly, after the book is finished ask the children to reflect and make connections, or to share something the learned about or thought about because of reading the book. Here is a video explaining a read aloud, it is focused a lot of fluency but it demonstrates a pretty good read aloud (please disregard the loud floral jacket - ha!).
A problem solving activity I think could be incorporated in the read aloud as well is asking the children how they would solve a problem in the book if they were the main character. This will allow the children to brainstorm the steps they would need to solve the problem at hand for the main character, and will allow them to exercise their "problem solving" skills. I think this is excellent because it really lets the children connect to what is being read, and allows them to make real world applications (stepping into someone else's shoes).
I hope this activity will help you in your classes! I know that when I do this in both of mine, it makes reading a book more interesting for everyone involved. Also, it helps you to gain some insight into how the children go about these processes and makes the learning meaningful - which we all know is very important in the long run!
Just curious: Do you think that kindergarten students understand the questioning practice and problem-solving skills enough to perform them on their own? You are basically modeling a set of metacognitive skills that we hope they adopt and perform on their own.
ReplyDeleteI completely understand where you are coming from! I think a lot of this is going to depend on the level of learning your students are for sure. I work in a preschool that is on UT's campus (it is used for teacher licensing students to implement teaching strategies they are learning) and the children there are exposed to the read alouds pretty early! I know this will not be the same for every student, but I have used it in this preschool (the ages range from 3-5) and had success and failures at times!
ReplyDeleteWhat I did notice is that since this was done on a consistent basis, the children started doing this practice to each other (reading, talking about the pictures or what they knew) to each other! Of course it is a form of mimicking.. but I think that is a great first step to put these into practice!
I hope this answered your question!