Drawing Conclusions

by Jill (Highlander)

This month, my favorite unit in literacy had students learning about the Moon and Mars. Through our literacy curriculum, our students have really been able to shine, sharing a lot of prior knowledge with each other, and facilitating other students’ abilities to draw conclusions. My favorite moment of the unit was when we were talking about meteorites hitting the moon, and we began to wonder together why the moon’s surface is much more scarred than the surface of the Earth, and why meteorites burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. One of my students, our resident astronomer, as I began calling him, had a lot of information about the atmosphere of the Earth and the Moon. As he shared his information (“The moon has only one thin layer of atmosphere, and the Earth has seven dense layers of atmosphere”) we could physically see the faces of the other students light up as they were able to draw a conclusion about why meteorites don’t burn up before they hit the moon. Since our skill for the week was drawing conclusions, one of the hardest skills to teach to ten year olds, it was a complete break-through for our whole class, and it left both teachers and students feeling proud and accomplished.