Embedded Files
Introduction
Introduction
Children, and adults, learn in a wide variety of ways. In order to make students creative observers and problem solvers, I work to actively engage all of their senses in our learning and instill the habit of looking at things from a variety of perspectives. This character trait helps students draw informed conclusions using multiple points of data, making them more active and thoughtful learners. In the following section, I highlight a few examples of how I help my students understand the world around them by teaching them to gather data using a variety of sensory problem-solving techniques.
In this 4 minute recorded interview of student A, included with parent consent, she explains how we use our five senses (taste, smell, sight, touch, and hearing) in class. When asked for specific examples, she mentions hearing the teacher and other students, smelling and tasting food such as through exploratory learning lessons, seeing our content displays, and touching (and smelling) our class pets, Lily and Daisy.
She also reflects on how her senses help her understand the skills we've learned in music, visual arts, and theater arts-integrated lessons. Finally, she explains how she is grateful to be able to use all of her senses as they help her understand the world. This interview demonstrate how the opportunities I have created for my students to use all of their senses while learning encourages them to engage deeply with the material and process content more clearly to draw their own conclusions. This student has also internalized this skill and clearly applies it to learning situations independently as well.
Music
Music
Using music is one way that I work to engage my students in our content in a fun and creative way. Music encourages students to listen closely and produce work with a level of auditory precision that encourages deep thinking, particularly when connected to auditory reading skills.
In this lesson, I taught my students how to use wooden castanets to keep a steady beat. Then, they practiced blending CVC words while using the castanets to encourage speed and automaticity with their blending. Following a beat helped them internalize our goal of reading words quickly and accurately, while also adding an element of novelty to the lesson. Being able to use instruments also increases their engagement.
Here is the lesson plan associated with this lesson. It is intended as an early practice for the introduction of blending as a phonics skill. Students learn to think about phonics in a creative and exciting way, while also having the auditory and tactile experiences of using instruments to create sound.
Brown AI Project Overview .docxVisual Arts
Visual Arts
Visual arts content-based lessons allow students to work with tactile substances and to learn from creating art physically. In the following two examples, my students learned ELA and math content more thoroughly by creating art using different materials such as paint, marker, oil pastels, construction paper, scissors, and glue.
In this project, students recreated a map of "The Three Little Pigs", where they made a magnetic Big Bad Wolf that they could move along a path to each little pig's house as they acted out the story. This was a chance for students to create something physical to help them understand an oral story while using a wide variety of visual art materials including cardboard, black marker, watercolor, and oil pastels. When finished, they could use the story board to act out and retell the story. Combining multiple art forms such as drama and visual arts also strengthens student connections to the content.
3LittlePigsThis video shows students acting out the story using their magnet character.
In this math lesson, students used construction paper, scissors, and glue to create their own pumpkins. This lesson took place during our unit about shapes, and in it students were able to experiment with cutting out different shapes to make unique pumpkin faces. Building hand eye coordination by using scissors and increasing familiarity with shapes at the same time allowed my students to feel more comfortable engaging with new content in different ways.
Theater & Dance
Theater & Dance
Physical movement is not only a necessity for young students, it can also act as a way to channel energy in order to increasing understanding. Using movement through theater and dance is a way for students to problem solve what storybook characters are experiencing through action. We often create short and informal dances to help us remember elements of a story, for example. The physical movement tied to a concrete idea allows students to make connections they may not otherwise in order to recall information.
We use elements of theater and dance formally and informally in our classroom. During one arts-integrated science unit, students created their own costumes to act out a small play about the environment. The costumes, mixed with the physical movement of the acting, helped students understand the science objectives of our lesson by making them connect more deeply to the content. Pretending to be a tree or a flower helped them identify with how a tree or a flower might feel surrounded by pollution. We also used recycled materials to make the costumes, which was a chance to put our content learning about environmentalism into practice.
Science and Exploratory Learning
Science and Exploratory Learning
Another way I have helped students engage with their learning through their senses is with lessons and centers that involve tactile experiences. The following slide show contains information about one of my science centers, where students were asked to think about and engage with different textures to understand how bumpier textures create more fiction and smoother textures have less friction.
ScienceCenter_Brown_RachelSky.pptxStudents used their senses in this center by working with the tactile elements of our car and the block ramp, as well as touching each of the textured surfaces that were put on the ramp. These surfaces included plain wood, felt, sand paper, smooth plastic, and construction paper. Students discussed how these surfaces felt to the touch, and their observations of how the surfaces affected the car's progress.
After exploring the surfaces by touching them and setting the toy car to run down them, students then sorted pictures of different types of roads (muddy, gravel, icy, and paved) and talked in partners about which surfaces might be smooth, or bumpy, or slippery. They then sorted the pictures to indicate which type of road might speed up or slow down a car's progress. Through this activity, they used their sense of touch to increase their understanding about friction and then applied this knowledge to a real world situation.
Class Pets
Class Pets
In addition to interacting with curriculum using all of our senses, we also frequently use our senses to interact with our class pets, Lily and Daisy. Lily and Daisy are two fancy rats who live in a large cage in our classroom. My students practice using their senses of sight and touch to get to know our pets on a personal level by observing them in their cage and in their ball, as well as by petting their fur and their tails.
People often have negative feelings about rats, but my students have learned how to use a larger "range of sensory problem solving strategies" to interact with these creatures who are very different from most other pets they've met (Costa & Kallick, 2000). They touch, look at, and talk to the pets to know them better. In this picture, my students are using their sense of sight to observe one of our pets while she rolls around in her ball. They also process what they've seen by asking and answering questions about her, such as "Why does she move her nose so much?" ("To smell things around her") and "Why does she like to run on her wheel?" ("To get exercise and have fun").
When I introduced our pets at the beginning of the year, I spoke with my students about how they are very intelligent animals, and we could tell by watching how they problem solve to get treats, balance with their tails in order to climb, and roll in their ball to smell different people and things around them. My students pet the rats about once per week using two fingers, practicing being gentle and using their sense of touch to understand how the rats feel.
This is a shared writing piece from early in the year that my students created about our rats. Before writing, I asked them to first observe the rats with their eyes to think about what they could say. One volunteer decided on the sentence "I see a silly rat", and then five different volunteers came up to sound out and write each word in the sentence. I drew the picture by adding details different students mentioned from their observations such as the wheel, the water bottle, and the climbing bridge. Seeing, hearing, touching, and smelling the pets helps my students notice more details and draw conclusions. Practicing close observation before writing is one technique I teach my students to increase their understandings as they use data from all senses to gather information. This encourages them to create more detailed work which they can support with clear explanations.
Conclusion
Conclusion
In order for students to become intelligent learners and problem solvers, they must figure out how to use all of their senses creatively. I actively work to create lessons and classroom opportunities for students to do this so that they will be able to reason and think about things from multiple perspectives, in any context. Music, visual arts, theater and dance, and interacting with our class pets all allow my students to learn more about the world by touching, speaking, listening, moving, and observing within it. Over the course of the year, my students internalize these traits to become more creative thinkers who produce accurate and detailed work.
References
Costa, A. L., & Kallick, B. (2000). Describing 16 Habits of Mind. Retrieved from http://www.habitsofmind.org/sites/default/files/16HOM2.pdf
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