Sunday, October 18, 2015

How a Conversation About Canada Turned into a discussion about the Titanic


You know how kids are... you begin a story about your fish (RIP Sushi) and suddenly your entire class has their hands up with a story about their pet. Except for little Owen, Owen tells a seemingly unrelated story about his favourite video game. Half an hour later everyone has had a turn to talk once and you are now on the second round (because now that Owen has talked about a video game everyone else needs to share about a game).



I was teaching in a grade 3 class the other day and at the end of the day the teacher had left me a book about Canada to read with the students. We were having a great time learning about Canada and the different things about this fabulous country (it was in the style of an ABC book so A was for something and B was for something) when we got to the letter G (which was for glaciers). On each page we would stop to talk a bit more about it (because I was trying to stretch the book out to get us to the end of the day) and what did we talk about for glaciers? Naturally they decided to talk about icebergs which led to us talking about the Titanic… I guess it wasn’t so far off.

It just reminds me of the time I was getting my grade 5/6 students to come up with some reflections on fairy tales (we were using The Three Little Pigs as an example). I told them that if they were in grade 1 they would all shoot their hands up and start talking about how the grandpa’s neighbor had a pig which would lead to someone else talking about how their grandpa’s neighbour’s neighbor had a dog. Which would obviously lead to someone telling me about their cat (because it often ends with discussions on cats). They had a good laugh about it and came up with some great reflections!


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