A prior learning activity, created to gather and connect facts, ideas, concepts, and/or words.
One of the activities that I took from last year's CI&A: Science course was the graffiti activity. In it, a word was written in the middle of the page and the students' job was to draw, write, or color anything they could possible think of about that word. Then they pass on the paper to different people who then add on their knowledge of that word through their drawings and writings. This is a good way to assess prior learning -- assessment for learning, as a matter of fact -- but it can also be hard to assess individual students because of the group work involved.
I first tried out the activity with my higher functioning classroom.
Group work seems to be a rare thing that the students do. When I arranged their desks so that there were six students per group, they were very excited. (I had never seen them do any group work with their Thai classes, as a matter of fact.) I then explained the activity and got them to do it. After two turns, they got the gist of it.
An unexpected thing happened, however.
The students had become very defensive with how others were treating their original posters. Many did not want to write over others' things, while some got angry after finding out that others had coloured in the drawings they had done. Instead of a sense of wonder and surprise upon receiving their original posters, some were angry.
It is my belief that the mentality of Thais was the cause for this. Thais take a lot of pride in the work that they do, and they are very particular about the quality of their work. So to the students, having others "graffiti" on to their work was risky and could deteriorate the quality of the work they had put in.
I had decided then to change things for my lower functioning group. Instead of group work, I chose to do individual work. The word was printed on regular sized paper, and the children passed on their posters individually to their neighbours until it reached the end of their rows, six passes later. The same thing occurred -- they got pretty defensive -- but it was less chaotic and more manageable. It was tougher to get started, however, because each child was alone to figure out how to start and what to do.
Though the activity may have been a bit of a failure, I did succeed, however, in identifying what they already know about the topic we were going to delve into -- which was extinction.
"Man's mind stretched by a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
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