Exposure is key to a child’s development.  When children have the opportunity to experience the natural world authentically, we allow greater capacity for the growth of their minds:  we expand their ability to problem find, problem solve, by being creative, critical thinkers.  Stemming from the monsoon-like nor’easter rain we experienced this past weekend, my daughters and I made a short detour home to go check out the Pootatuck River.  We experienced the shear strength of the flowing water over two of the constructed waterfalls that used to provide hydroelectric power to a some factories.  We documented our experience with photo, writing, drawing, and sound.  Our products?  Below:

The girls at the waterfall

The second waterfall

Anna's (7) drawing of the waterfall

Anna writes about the waterfall

Maggie's (5) drawing of the waterfall. What monsters are living below the surface?

Maggie writes about the waterfall

We also did a short audio recording of the amazing sound of the waterfall.  My voice recorder didn’t intially capture the deep, grand sound of the water, so I used audacity to modify the file.  Click on the icon to hear it:

My colleagues at McGill and I recently published an article in LEARNing Landscapes entitled, Inquiry Literacy: A Proposal for a Neologism. You can read the article here.

from: www.maine.gov

My colleagues and I have been attempting to develop a definition for inquiry literacy.  Undoubtedly embedded within that definition are effective reading and writing skills.  Others agree.  Thanks to D.B. for pointing me to this wiki, specifically focused on inquiry, reading, and writing.

http://tieconference.wikispaces.com/3206

I teach responsibility of giving credit to others with my students.  I need to model good practice and do the same myself.

I’ve often challenged students to think about conceptual learning and big ideas.  I’ve never been one for learning isolated facts, because those “facts” are usually lost after a summative assessment.  If students focus on concepts, they are more likely to retain their knowledge and be able to connect these ideas to new knowledge better.  Conceptual learning certainly would resonate with anyone who would subscribe to a constructivist philosophy of education.

Recently I read a blog post by Wesley Fryer touting a new Web 2.0 tool, Wordle:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Here’s a Wordle for this blog:

I was pleased to see how often the words “students” and “learning” appear in my writing. Close behind were “technology,” “instruction,” and “data.” This represents what I would think my major thoughts and musings are.

I thought about how powerful this tool might be for allowing students to examine their own writing. Willing to evaluate myself, I processed my Review of Literature from my dissertation. No surprises here either:

Now finding this VERY interesting, I thought I’d do a comparison of my Results Section:

I really have a sense of what my study was about when I examine the Conclusions:

Wordle is not content audited, so teachers who might choose to use this tool should be sensitive to appropriate Internet safety for their students. However, the power to allow students to creatively interpret their written work, and then examine content trends seems very powerful to me.