Tracking Our Thinking

This month, I've had the pleasure of facilitating a 3rd grade reading group for an hour each morning. We're reading Silverwing, which is absolutely an amazing book to read, and it's rich and complex and leads to great discussions.

After about a week or so, I realized our group had a ton of papers and sticky notes all over the place: a character chart we were all adding to, a paper for our new vocabulary and then a million sticky notes about our questions as we read. I started thinking of a more organized way to track our thinking.

Enter the Silverwing Readers wiki, a lovely little work in progress. One stop shopping for our growing character traits, vocabulary added to our 'batpack' and a place for us to document our discussions. I absolutely love it and see huge potential for it as a practical way of using technology in the classroom. Just imagine how authentic and organized a student-led conference would be if a student showed their parents how they are tracking their thinking this way.

The only downside to this that I see is the legwork involved in getting kids set up on the wiki and teaching them how to use it. My thought is to work with interested teachers and set up small groups of book clubs to get them started.

Here's one more example of a 5th grade teacher here at ISB, Chrissy, who is already using wikis for book club thinking.