Transcript

This is the big idea center, and the focus for the big idea center is inference. And one of the things I've been working towards all year with my students has been the understanding that literature, particularly fiction, is organized, or the purpose of literature, is to express big ideas. That authors have ideas in mind that they would like to get across when they write works of fiction. So, throughout the year I've done a lot of modelling and a lot of shared work with students, getting them to understand that the particular book I've read them is full of big ideas, that it's up to them to interpret, to combine with their background knowledge and their own beliefs and their own thoughts and to figure out what that book is really about. Because I really think it would be a shame for students to miss those big ideas in all those beautiful children's stories that they love so much. At a certain point in the year students have a level of facility with spotting these big ideas and making their inferences about them that they're ready to start expressing those inferences in different ways. 

So I created the big ideas center, filled it with books that children love. Some very familiar that I've read to the kids already, some that are new to them; many of them along a particular theme of big ideas. Many of the books are looking at gender, looking at what boys roles and girls roles might be and asking questions about those types of ideas, to give kids something to hold onto, if there's one in there that Ive read to them already there might be a few others that I haven't, but have similar big ideas. And their job sometimes is just to read and enjoy, and then together at a certain point we generated a list of ways that students could express their thinking about the big ideas. So students have many different ways of reflecting on the big ideas and texts and bringing their background knowledge into that, and at a certain point in the year they're ready to express that in many different ways. So we got together as a class and generated a great list of different writing forms that they're comfortable with that they thought would be good avenues to express their understanding of the big ideas. So my students know about making comics, they know about making webs, they know about drawing a picture and then writing about it, they know about labelled diagrams and several other things. 

So we came up with a list of forms that they are very familiar with, and talked about how they could take their understanding of big ideas and express it through these different written forms. What it became was a center during my literacy centers in my classroom, where students can go and read these wonderful books, so I think that's where it starts, these are all great books that kids love, and then make their inferences about the big ideas, sometimes we call them authors messages or themes, that they see in the books, and then find a writing form that's comfortable for them to express that. Sometimes they express it through a comic, where its not a direct expression they're not saying I think the big idea is, but they're actually telling a story with the same big idea that they read in a story, which is very, very high, higher order thinking. I was very impressed by that. Sometimes they're making a web where they're just directly expressing what they see as the big idea. And sometimes they choose just to draw a picture and label it that shows what they think the big ideas were. 

So some of the things that students saw when they read the different books, and it's very interesting to look at what they see because what they see is different depending on their own world view and their own background knowledge. And one of my students whos a boy, read a book called My Princess Boy, which is about a boy who is essentially gender nonconformist. He doesn't dress like the other boys think he should dress, hes not interested in things that stereotypically are attributed to boys. And one of my students read that, and it really spoke to him. And he chose to show his understanding of his big ideas through a comic strip, and instead of directly stating, I think the big idea is fill-in-the-blank because he constructed a story about something hes really interested in which is basketball. He talked about Kobe Bryant, and talked about Kobe Bryants team wearing pink uniforms and how the crowd actually criticized them for doing that, and how at the end of the story, Kobe and his teammates, got together and realized it was OK to be who they were and wear those uniforms. So I thought it was a really incredible, creative enterprise for this student and its representative of what a lot of the students in the class are doing and choosing to show their understanding of the big ideas.

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