MINILESSON Elaborate on Learning to Help Knowledge Stick CONNECTION Channel research groups to spend a few minutes adding the new information they’ve learned to their concept maps. “Botanists, today is the last day you’ll spend researching and learning all you can about your current topic. Tomorrow, you’ll get a brand new plant research topic. “Pull out your concept maps, and place them in the middle of your research groups. Will you spend three minutes right now as a group, adding some of the new information you’ve learned to your concept map? Work together to add as much important information as you can. And if you run out of things to add, check back with the texts you’ve read for ideas.” “Wow, Botanists! Your concept maps are really filling up! Let’s make sure we can hold onto all this new information we’re learning.” Name the teaching point. “Today I want to teach you that one way to remember as much as you can about your topic is to ask yourself questions and try to answer them. Scientists who have studied how we learn and remember suggest it’s especially important to ask how and why questions, and then to try to answer them.” Add a new sticky note to your “Nonfiction Readers Research New Topics” anchor chart. TEACHING Coach partners to use your class concept map to solidify their learning, asking and answering questions based off of the concepts you’ve jotted. “Let’s try this together. We’ll study our class concept map first, thinking about how and why questions we could ask. Then, we’ll ask a question and try to answer it, saying as much as we can to answer it. If we can’t remember everything, we can always look back in a text to help us recall the important parts.” Display the class concept map. “Hmmm…well, here on the concept map, we jotted that plants have leaves.” Tap that section of the concept map. “Let’s ask how or why questions about that information. Maybe I could ask a question like, ‘Why do plants have leaves?’ or ‘How do leaves help plants survive?’ “Let’s try answering that second question: how do leaves help plants survive? With your research group, try to talk as long as you can about this idea. If you run out of things to say, look back at the concept map to find other ideas that might connect.” Listen for students to suggest that leaves do a lot to help plants survive. Some plants have big, flat leaves so they can absorb a lot of sunlight all at once and make more food. Some plants have waxy leaves, which help the plants hold in water during long, dry winters. Plants like cacti have no leaves—they would probably lose too much water with them. Plus, leaves help most plants make food through photosynthesis. “Wow, Botanists! Do you see how we used our concept map to remind ourselves about what we’ve been studying? We asked how and why questions about that thing, and then we tried to answer them, saying as much as we could. This kind of quizzing will really help us hold onto what we’re learning about plants.”
Nonfiction Readers Research New Topics
Elaboration is a cognitive learn- ing strategy by which learners connect new information to their existing knowledge. The offi- cial term for this is elaborative interrogation—share it with your students if you wish. Students can ask themselves or others questions about how and why things work, and then produce the answers. As students talk, support their elaboration. You could tap related ideas on the concept map, like “desert,” to help stu- dents elaborate. You might post a section from Plants in Different Habitats that references plants’ leaves, and say, “Use this information to help you say more.” We suggest pages 11 or 12.
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Bend I • Strengthen Nonfiction Research Skills: Researching Plants
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