Embracing the chaos

When you see students sitting at their desks completely silent and working on their assignments you would assume they are learning and the teacher must have great classroom management skills. But what if you saw a room where the students are noisy, laughing and all around the room? If you walked into my classroom for Intervention, math and science that's what you would see. During intervention the students are learning about Reader's theater and I have them in 6 different heterogeneous reading groups. I told them what reader's theater is and gave them a demonstration. I also taught them about using expression and phrasing. Then I assigned them scripts and characters and they took it from there. Most of the scripts are based off of ether different books or fairy tales. (One was CLICK ClACK MOO!)While walking around I was intervening in the groups and asking them about their thoughts and throwing in an idea or two. Some of the groups where going beyond just reading the script with a little expression. They were figuring out where they would stand when presenting, figuring out if they could use any props, finding hand/small movements they could do and then rehearsing with their new ideas. The room seemed to be in chaos, but I guess I would call it organized chaos. They were learning and knew what their jobs where.

Then during math as an extension when students are complete they had a choice of two games, one being multiplication wrestling and the other being beat the calculator. When the students are playing the games you can tell they are really interested in them. It's interesting listening to their conversations and essentially hearing them learn. As a teacher I could have just made a few more worksheets with practice problems on them for the students to complete. This would have fit the picture of the typical classroom. But why not make math more engaging? Isn't it more real life to use it in a competition than doing drill and practice?

Our last chaotic moment happened during science. The new unit is over magnetism and the students where introduced to the magnet. As a way to get those new item jitters out they were able to take the magnet around the room and see what they discover with it. I think this is an important part of the lesson. Students will be trying to stick it on all the different hings in the room anyway, why not just let them do it all at once. It was also interesting watching them discover. One student found that when the magnet is dropped into the sink the right way it rolls all the way across and up the other side...I later thought about how I should have added the idea of gravity helping it, I will have to remember that for next time I teach the lesson. The students where all over the classroom "playing" with the magnets. After I had them experiment a little we filled out a KWL charts. Each student got two sticky notes, then they wrote either a question or what they knew about magnets and stuck it on the chart.

I think some teachers would have a problem with this kind of learning. I like the fact that they are discovering on their own and able to find out for themselves the different things about magnets, or add in that extra stuff for their reader's theater. In the real world we are not taught but practicing in worksheets or having someone always tell us what we need to know, we discover new things by doing them.