FIRST LEARNING MISSION OF THE PROJECT: Becoming meteorologists

Hello bilingual gardeners!

I'm back again to tell you the exciting experience of turning flat activities into super learning missions. Flat activities are the most common exercises that any teacher out of a PBL approach or any other kind of innovative teaching uses in the classroom. I'm referring for instance to those of fill in the gaps, match the word with its definition, write the parts of the body/plant, read the text and answer the questions, etc. All of which are not in the end very motivating and meaningful for students. 

Learning missions are exactly the opposite, they are extremely motivating and what is most important, they are connected with the real world, they are actual tasks that they might have to deal with in their future lives. Some examples could be: to organise a birthday party or a trip to anywhere, to solve a problem in the toilets of the school, a recipe contest, to design an advertisement, etc. 

As you will imagine, this is not an easy process, because it involves drafting instructions, setting the goals to be accomplished by the students, looking for the adequate digital artefacts, making a list of online tools that could be used, specifying the targeting competences, and  designing the assessment tools and criteria. However, we are so lucky of living in the digital age where we can find almost everything online. In this case, there are some websites that can help us making the path easier with plenty of resources. For example the Cape-Breton Victoria Education Center provides teachers with a complete template for project based learning webquests. I've also visited the  PBL-online website and I have to say that it is very, very useful for planning the project, because there you are all the steps, that need to be taken, very clearly explained. Moreover, I've also found these websites with a wide range of project ideas and artefacts: Ereading worksheets and Artefactosdigitales.com.

As far as evaluation is concerned, there are also resources that may help you such as the 4Teachers checklist where you will find a template to explain the project expectations to your students. 

You could also get inspired from projects already done such as the Earth day challenge or the ones in Sun associates.  

So, after searching all these tools for getting inspiration and have an idea of how to create a mission, it's time to hands-on working on my missions! 

Before starting, I'm going to show you the summary of the steps I'm going to follow in the following image made with Canva.

First of all, the objectives are the following ones:

• Identify the basic weather conditions and other parameters from a weather forecast report (vocabulary)
• Find the tools that meteorologists use to collect atmospheric data
• Create in groups one of those tools
• Develop listening, reading and speaking skills

And the competences:

• Linguistic communication
• Knowledge and interaction with the physical world
• Cultural and artistic competence
• Learn to learn
• Autonomy and initiative
• Digital competence

As I explained in previous posts, this is a collaborative project that intends to work with other schools worldwide. This shouldn't be a concern since I'm pretty sure that there are hundreds of schools over the world waiting to get involved in an experience such as this one. In fact, many schools in Spain are already partnering with other ones overseas in order to exchange experiences and activities like the one I've created. In my case, I'm going to invent that school since I don't even have actual students to carry out the project.

Having said that, my project will start with an e-mail from the St George school students, from Dublin, asking about the weather in our city (Madrid):

Dear Second Graders of the Bilingualism Garden School,We are a group of students of the same age than you. We are planning a trip to Madrid but we don't know how the weather is right there. We need to know it in order to know the type of clothes that we should wear. We would appreciate if you described it for us. The trip is planned for the end of next April. 

Thank you so much to all of you

We are looking forward to hearing from you soon

Second graders of St George school

The teacher will start a dialogue with the students in order to find the most appropriate solution. Unless any child suggests it before, she will be the one to propose to record a TV forecast program and send it to them. But, she will explain that before doing anything, they will have to become really good meteorologists. And there we go with the first super learning mission: BECOMING METEOROLOGISTS; composed of 3 challenges. 

In the first challenge, the students will be asked to watch the following video and make a mind map with all the weather conditions found (like the one below).

Mind map created with GoConqr by @crishesgarden

The teacher will provide them with the necessary links, instructions and scaffolding to complete the challenge. They will have 45 minutes for that. 

The second challenge will involve flipped classroom. The teacher will post in her blog the instructions that are basically watching the TV forecast news at home (in their mother tongue) and notice other things that the host mentions apart from the ones already learned. They will have to write a reply to the post. 

Finally, the last challenge will take more time and it's where the students will really feel what to be a meteorologist is. They will have to search on the net information about the tools that meteorologists use to gather all the data given in the weather forecast. The teacher will give them the links using QR codes to motivate them. They will scan them with tablets and investigate within the websites.

After that, the teacher will divide the whole class into 3 groups and each group will have to build a rain gauge, a wind vane or a barometer with the materials and instructions provided by the teacher (also using QR Codes).

Instructions for the rain gauge: 

Instructions for the wind vane: 

(method 1)

Instructions for the barometer:

The teacher will also make a thermometer for them (because it is more difficult for them). This will take approximately 3 sessions of 45 minutes. 

And once they have finished them all, we will start using them to collect atmospheric data for the following missions.

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MY REFLECTION

This has been my first time crafting a supper learning mission. I decided to plan it like a mission instead of turning flat activities into a supper learning mission because I thought that this way it would be easier, although at the end it's been done thinking on the flat activities that students have to complete in class. 

At the beginning of this post, I said that creating supper learning missions was not an easy process. However, I think that it is not easy if you have been working with flat activities during all your career as a teacher, but once you know how the things work within project based learning, it's not that difficult. The only thing is that it requires a lot of time and research by the teacher. 

As you can see at the very beginning of this post, I made some research regarding PBL and I found a wide range of useful information that I could use.
As for the mission, it is called "becoming meteorologists" because it sounds rather motivating for kids. If I had had more time, I would have done the first video myself instead of looking for that one in Youtube, although it is quite complete and useful. 
Then, through the crafting of this mission, I have known for the first time two educational tools absolutely useful. 
The first one is Goconq, an interesting tool to do mind maps that not only is easy to use but that allows also  to freely download any mind map created. In fact, I have used it for educational purposes but also for studying other subjects.
The other tool is QR codes. To be honest, I knew them because they are popular nowadays but I'd never used them. It has been such a discovery, because at the beginning I planned the same activity without them, just making the list of links, and it seemed to be pretty boring. Now, it sounds attractive even for me. The negative part is that they require the school to have mobile devices such as tablets or smartphones, something not very common in public schools. 

An that's all for the first mission! You can go to the following post to see the follow up of the project with the second super learning mission! 
I hope you liked it!