Spring: A time for Reflection at Spicewoood

"We don't learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience." -John Dewey

Each Spring Spicewood students engage in a reflection that connects them to the collaborative goals they set at the beginning of the year, and has them sharing a year's worth of celebrations with their families. It is so exciting to see them flipping through the pages of their portfolios, eyes opening wider at each page as they look at their work from the year, and mark their progress with smiles and pride!
All Spicewood students will engage in portfolio conferences on May 6th. From kindergarten to 5th grade, Spicewood's learners lead and facilitate their own conference as they share their work across the PYP transdisciplinary themes and subject areas!
In addition to our portfolio conferences that day, our 5th graders are sharing the culminating project of they PYP journey through the Exhibition. This year our students are exploring the ways that creative expression inspires people to take action! Beginning in March students are shepherded through the project by a Spicewood staff mentor who has helped them not only plan for their project, but also reflect on their learning throughout the program. Each week they meet and look at the impact of the essential elements of the PYP: skills, knowledge, concepts, attitudes and action. In small groups students discuss how their learning has been impacted by exploring these things and what it means for their perspectives as learners and how they view the world. These conversations are a way to consolidate the aspects of a PYP education, while simultaneously completing a project that exemplifies all the elements of the program.
Reflecting on experiences encourages insight and transfers understanding to new contexts that go beyond the classroom. Students solidify growth when they are asked to control their learning, and we believe this process is enhance by exploring and discussing this learning with others. This is also part of inquiry, we learn and expand on that learning by the presence, ideas, thoughts, and questions of other learners. For students at Spicewood this continues through to the reflection process and is shared at our Spring conferences!
We hope you join us on May 6th to watch our students synthesize their year and joyfully share it with those around them!

Visible Thinking Routines Bring Inquiry Alive

Collaborative learning is a practice we engage in to promote inquiry. We believe that student talk leads to a more complex understanding of the concepts we are exploring. Students learn through verbalizing/recording their ideas and observations and from the ideas and observations of their peers. These thoughts interact to broaden understanding, build perspective, and give depth to our own thinking. One way to build these conversations into our classroom is to practice Visible Thinking Routines from Harvard's Project Zero. These routines promote thinking by building upon shared understandings through dialogue and questioning.

This week in 3rd grade students in each class engaged in a thinking routine called: See, Think, Wonder. This is a routine designed to engage students in observational skills and inferring in order to think about what we see on the surface and what we can conclude and wonder about as a result of those observations. 3rd grade launched their Sharing the Planet unit and are beginning to explore ecosystems and the ways organisms interact within them. They are looking to investigate the factors that impact communities within ecosystems. As a way to formatively assess what students know about ecosystems and its components, each teacher engaged in a version of See, Think, Wonder.
Students were given the opportunity to look at a variety of ecosystems and record and share what they saw and how this made them think about (draw conclusions) what their observations meant for the ecosystem (i.e. it looks like a drought, I wonder if this has impacted what grows or lives there). Students took turns discussing with their peers and drawing conclusions about their thinking.
Visible Thinking Routines are a powerful way to engage students with images and texts and go beyond the immediate and obvious information. Check out Project Zero's page to learn more!

2nd Grade Students Express Themselves Through Poetry!

2nd graders have just wrapped up their How We Express Ourselves unit on poetry (Central idea: people express themselves through poetry). As a way to celebrate their expressions, they invited their families and the community to come hear them read them live, as well as share them on various forms of media.
While exploring ways to share their poems students considered the various forms of technology they could integrate in order to reach a wider audience and to express their creativity in different, and innovative ways.

Embracing Diversity in the PYP

This year our No Place For Hate student group created a Diversity Tree to celebrate all the languages we currently speak, as well as the languages of our direct ancestors.  This is one way we embrace both our diversity, and the mother tongue languages of our teachers and students. In Spicewood's recently updated Language Policy we state:

     "Language is valued as central to developing critical thinking, and is considered essential for the cultivation of intercultural awareness and the development of internationally minded and responsible members of local, national, and global communities. We feel that students and parents who speak another language bring an added perspective to learning. We value their views and encourage them to share."


This is one way we are honoring the transdisciplinary theme of Who We Are while demonstrating the Learner Profile attributes of communicator, and inquirer and the attitudes of appreciation and respect.