This is a blog that will hold ruminations and rants of Kim and Alana, two wanna-be (certified and employable!) teachers with bigger-than-public-education dreams. We have invited 4th and 5th graders (who turned out to all be girls) to join a voluntary after-school Book Club once a week. Our hopes are for the girls to begin discussing books in more critical ways, moving beyond surface understandings and into more analytical and evaluative higher order thinking. We want to have some juicy conversations and enjoy some books!
It felt right to tell the girls what we were hoping for from book club, what our motivation was for them. We explained our situation, about being in the Masters program and needing to do a project; we told them they were it! We brought some Bloom's Taxonomy visuals (they were called "A Blooming Orange" and we eat oranges every week for snack). Alana was reading off some of the verbs in the "Understand" section, particularly predict, explain, compare, and she asked the girls if they had heard these words before. They were all like, "Yeeeaahh, in class," in a communal moan-y way. We explained we wanted them to go beyond that and be intellectual and smart with their words, because we know they have smart thoughts already, just not really a place to share them. Some of the words we highlighted in the visual were create, choose, decide, design, solve, show, investigate. We told them these were how we wanted them to come to Book Club, planning to go beyong
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