Thursday, October 30, 2014

"Silly" Unit Development

Devin, Kate, and I found a commonality between our students in their writing. Many of our students were talking about things that seem silly or nonsensical to us like robots made of string cheese or chocolate fountains. We each teach primary grades so we wanted to work with a theme that was age appropriate but interesting to them. We decided upon silly early on and began generating questions for our students like "when have you been silly?", "what happens when you get silly?", "what would a silly school look like?", and "what do you think is silly?". We began talking about artists that explore this theme, either through hyperbole, size manipulation, or through content. We plan on meeting again soon to generate a list of questions for our students to help them understand this theme more. We briefly talked about what grade might be best to do this with and what materials might be interesting to explore, but it seems like that will be hashed out more in our next meeting. 

1 comment:

  1. I'm very excited about this SILLY work.
    Often we organize our thinking with "minor aesthetic concepts" such as cute, creepy, grunge....
    This open ended theme effortlessly connects to ways in which students might understand and connect wit the world.
    Another question "Did anyone ever tell you that you were being silly when you were being serious?"

    ReplyDelete