The Class Brain

A couple of weeks ago I attended a teachers conference called edcampPlano. It was really great...lots of great topics to choose from and lots of great info to get! Loved it!

I went to a class by Diane Dahl (http://www.fortheloveofteaching.net/) on brain based learning. What a wealth of information! She brought in a project that her class did (look under metacognition lesson was a huge success) and it had me very interested in trying this in our own home classroom with the boys. I sort of changed it up so it will better work for a daily practice rather than all one time. We started out chatting about our brains and what our brains do and how they work and we looked at pictures, stuff like that. Then I gave each of them three pieces of pipe cleaner and we talked about the neurons in our brain and how they work and how our brain ties together information that we already learned with new information that we are learning. They caught on real quickly with the fun of pipe cleaners! So we began by talking about some of the different subjects we cover each day. Then we talked about how we would build our own brains by learning new things about each subject. So I let them know that they would build the class brain as well as their own. So each day, a couple of times, as

we start a subject I'll have them grab a couple of pipe cleaner pieces and tell me some things they know about that subject or what we've been covering, or what we learned yesterday, something like that. It has been a great experience to see them recalling information so easily. Both boys are beginning to understand more about how their brain works because I continually remind them through words actions and funny noises and gestures about how the neurons and axons and dendrites of their brains are tying together as they learn. It's been a lot of fun and I'm excited to see how it grows throughout the year. The brain currently hang from the ceiling fan right in the middle of the room but I'm thinking it may be too big for that area very soon.

More to come...Wendy