English – The Twits

This week I spent some time in the year 4 classroom observing and interacting with the students during English.

They were working on a unit on Roald Dah’s ‘The Twits‘ with the C2C focus being on character development within a narrative.

Jason was seeking to scaffold the students in an investigation of the language used within the book relating to the character development of Mr Twit and Mrs Twit with the focus being on who of the two was the most powerful character and how the author is able to build a picture of this with his choice of language.

The students had already highlighted some words previously in their eBook version of The Twits.   This included action words for Mr Twit – ‘How is he acting?” and thinking words for Mrs Twit – “How is Mrs Twit feeling?”

They then used Popplet to map these words out – catering well for students who are visual learners.   Some of these examples are below:

COMING SOON

It was interesting to walk around at this time and observe the students working.  Some of them were working with a partner and discussing their choice of words which they then put into each of their mind maps.  There were a couple of larger groups who were working together and getting the task done in quite a collaborative way.  What was interesting was the way they were exploring the functionality of the iPad at the same time.  Some were exploring the ability to add pictures from the book into their mind maps and others were playing with the colour inversion functionality of the ipad display and how this could impact on the pictures in the text.

The students then were invited to share their products.   Mirroring via the Apple TV, a couple of students shared their products.   A discussion occurred about the impact Mr Twit’s behaviour was having on Mrs Twit.  A discussion occurred about the addition of pictures which both of these students has done.

The class was then given a couple more minutes to add or modify the popples and to also add a picture.  The pathway to do this wasn’t made explicit.  Rather, Jason invited them to explore this functionality and if they weren’t able to do it, said that Mila would run a tutorial on it.  Students then worked to achieve this using one of a multiple pathways.   It was nice to see students showing each other how to do this.

 

A tutorial on Popplet:

 

Nicola

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