The Trial of A. Wolf

This awesome lesson was created by Debbie Tchir-Houle, and it was too fun and amazing not to share with everyone! A huge shout-out goes to Deb for all of the hard work she put into setting up this activity, it was so comprehensive and well thought out!!

So here is the activity:
Using the book "The true Story of the 3 Little Pigs" by Jon Sciezska, students are witness in the trial of A.Wolf. They are asked to evaluate the evidence presented to arrive at either a guilty or innocent verdict for A. Wolf, who is accused of killing and eating 2 little pigs and attempting to kill the third. There are several exhibits from both the defence and prosecution that support either an innocent or guilty verdict. Students are shown all the evidence, and then left to arrive at a verdict based on what they seen and heard during the trial. 

I made a digital collection of the evidence (which is embedded below), but Deb has a physical collection as well that goes along with it! 

Here are some pictures of the evidence

When the students were finished, they had to go to their science blogs and explain their verdict, as well as their justification of why they decided he was either innocent or guilty. It was a nice tie between our evidence and investigation unit and language arts, where we just finished writing a news article about the Big Bad Wolf escaping from jail. Plus, it was a pretty fun science lesson!! 

Here are a few of our Blog posts:

http://taneshascienceblog.blogspot.ca/2016/02/the-trial-of-awolf.html

http://danielkscienceblog.blogspot.ca/2016/02/the-trail-of-wolf.html

http://kaydencescienceblog.blogspot.ca/2016/02/the-trial-of-awolf.html

Concept maps for Vocabulary

I'm in a really interesting course right now on connecting science and literacy in the classroom and I came across a useful good idea I thought I would share. By having students create a concept map in a small group to introduce a unit in science, you are able to engage them in meaningful discussion about the vocabulary they will be using during the unit of study. 

To do this activity, you simply print out a list of the vocabulary words that the students will be using during the unit and give each group a sheet. In small groups, you challenge them to arrange and glue the words on a blank sheet of paper based on the connections between them. They also need to write their own definition of the words as a group and use lines to connect words that are related in some way. Any words they are unsure about they use sticky tack to place on the side to connect in later. 

We did this activity today to introduce our evidence and investigation unit, and I couldn't believe how rich the dialogue was! Students were actually discussing the vocabulary and trying to work together to figure out what the words meant and how they could be connected together. For me, whose class is full of non-talkers, this was a big breakthrough! 

Here they are, working away!