At Provo Primary School, Miss Bonnie has been inspiring her students with The Private Eye, a program encouraging students to look closely at everyday objects and answer questions to develop their creativity and thinking skills, as well as how to transfer that to paper. At Miss Bonnie's Blog we can see the process as well as examples of her students work. In what ways can this approach be effective in getting students to dig deeper when writing their thoughts? How can learning to theorize and think by analogy be useful in other subjects?
I love this idea of using a jeweler’s loupe in the classroom! Students can get an authentic, close-up view of any object (within reason) that they want to. When students, myself included, are asked to write thoughts on a particular subject/object, it is easy to focus on just one aspect of that subject/object. However, it is more rewarding to consider multiple perspectives and dimensions to create a “deeper,” more thorough writing. The jeweler’s loupe allows students to look at something in a different way because of its magnified perspective. I think this would only lead to a deeper understanding of the subject and therefore, more effective writing.
ReplyDeleteI noticed that many the students’ poems contained similes and metaphors. With the help of the jeweler’s loupe, students were able to compare their subjects to others, thus creating analogies and conveying to the reader (and themselves) what the subjects are like from a magnified perspective. Thinking with analogy is useful in any subject because a main purpose of an analogy is to describe the relationship between something unknown to something known; this relationship allows the reader to have a better understanding.
I think that this "private eye" technique could be used as an amazing tool to teach students to see the beauty and find appreciation in the world all around them. From these new found appreciations and explorations they can explore their own writing skills by writing about what they see. All teachers can utilize tools such as this one in order to make learning fun and excite students who might otherwise not be engaged.
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