It worked!

I recently talked with a fellow blogger and teacher. She had shared with me how in Georgia Heard's book, A Place for Wonder, the students researched their topics and questions by looking at the books and then WALKING AWAY to write down their thinking. This caused the students to have to paraphrase and NOT copy...oh my goodness! I did this today and you should have seen how these students worked! We could have researched for an hour and I don't think it would have been enough for them. Now, granted some students ended up researching more than one topic and one boy only wrote one fact. BUT...when you have students thanking you and telling you that this was the best thing ever...I think Georgie was on to something in her book.

And...I shared it with one of my colleagues and she's going to try it with her class. I'm excited to see how it goes!

Can you tell I'm excited for tomorrow? We're going to dive into the index and find answers to certain questions and then Friday, begin writing down big topics to teach and sort our facts. LOVE IT!