Primary eNews – Nov 11th, 2022
Over the last several weeks, our Unit of Inquiry in Grade 2 focused on How We Organize Ourselves, with the central idea that: Communities provide interconnected services designed to meet people’s needs.
Various resources, such as books, videos, stories and websites allowed the Grade 2 students to dive deeply into this inquiry and understand the complexity of the central idea.
Critical thinking is defined as a set of skills and habits that include the ability to define a problem, identify assumptions, analyze ideas, and reason critically, and then systematically list different possible causes, create plausible solutions, or evaluate its correctness using logical reasoning. It also includes the ability to make creative connections between ideas from different disciplines.
As PYP teachers, our goal is always to encourage critical thinking in the classroom and one of the ways we do this in Grade 2 is by teaching students to ask questions that are open-ended, allowing them to connect prior knowledge and apply what they have learned. In our classroom we first asked: What is a community and what is its purpose? What is a service in the community? What are our needs versus our wants? Below are some examples of our connections.
We connected what we learned to our own community in Sanur and thought about what services are available there. Since as a class we had already defined community, service, interconnectedness and needs, this task was simple and fun.
Group projects and discussions are another excellent way to encourage critical thinking and in our class, and in Grade 2, a lot of our learning is based on group projects. We got very creative through many discussions and group brainstorming sessions, and decided to create a community that reflected our interests and abilities. By connecting different ideas we came up with a big community project, with various services and characteristics reflective of an ideal community.
Students brainstormed ideas for what would happen to our community if their service was not present.
The following are some examples their thinking clouds, explaining Grade 2’s reasoning:
