Introducing the Project to the Students

Today, I met with the other grade 5 teachers at my school. We are all completing the Census at School task. So far we have collected data from 58 grade five students at our school. We decided as a team that this is enough data and we do not need to track down those students (there are about 10 of them) who have yet to fill out the survey.

On Wednesday, we will be introducing the project to all of the grade fives. We discussed that we would start by re-visiting the survey questions (a PDF of the questions can be found HERE). We want students to explore a question, or combination of questions, that interests them. Saying that, we are anticipating that for some students, this may be too open-ended. We have created a list of possible questions that we will make available to students unable to determine a suitable exploration question on their own.

The list includes the following (dates refer to the year in which that question was added to the survey):

• In how many languages can you hold an everyday conversation? (2007)
• Do you have allergies?  (2004)
• Right-handed, left-handed or ambidextrous? (2005)
• What do you usually eat for breakfast? (2005)
• Why do you think some kids bully others? (2009)
• Which method do you use most often to communicate with friends? (2007)
• Primarily what type of water do you drink at home? (2007)
• Importance of Environmental Initiatives (2007)
• Importance of Technology (2007)

• What colour are your eyes?  (2003)
• How do you usually travel to school? (2004)
• How long does it usually take you to travel to school? (2003)
• What is your favourite subject? (2006)
• If you had $1,000 to donate to charity, what type of organization would you choose? (2005)
• Whom do you look up to? (2003)
• How many people usually live in your household? (2007)
• Which of the following pets do you have? (2004)

Students will be tasked with determining a question (either one from the survey or one they come up with based on the survey questions), explaining why they chose those questions, and make predictions (with supporting details) regarding the data for our school’s grade five population (sample size = 58). Once they have written their objectives and predictions, we will provide them a link to the school data.

The school data will be given in the form of a link to a viewable Google doc. Students can make a copy of the doc in order to manipulate it in their own Google drive. From here, teachers will be observing how the students use the data to fulfil their objectives. As all grade 5 students will be completing the project, we will be having students with similar questions conference together (our goal here is to explore the “Collaborative knowledge construction” dimension of the Critical Thinking competency).

This is just the initial launch. All of us here at St. Gabriel are excited to see how the students decide to use the data, collect the data, organize the data, and interpret the data. There are many directions that they could go and we are cognizant to allow the students to take the lead. Wish us luck!