Sunday, August 23, 2009

Questions … How was school today? and more …

I just read Will Richardson’s blog post about his children starting at a new school. He has high hopes for an authentic education for his children at this new school.

He said that he wanted to be sure to ask his kids more interesting questions than the usual “How was school today?” or “What did you do at school today?”

meaningful POSTER After reading Part 1of his (never ending, I assume) list of questions to ask his children, I decided the questions should be made into posters.

I have not had enough time to make them all. Perhaps some of you will make some even more interesting and thought provoking posters as well.

Here are the beginning questions of a continually expanding list of questions Will wants to ask them:

What did you make today that was meaningful?

Learn about world POSTER What did you learn about the world?

Who are you working with?

What surprised you?

What did your teachers make with you?

What did you teach others?

What unanswered questions are you struggling with?

Working with POSTER How did you change the world in some small (or big) way?

What’s something your teachers learned today?

What did you share with the world?

What do you want to know more about?

What did you love about today?

What made you laugh?

What questions do you ask your students and your children when the day is over?

5 comments:

Lisa Nielsen said...

Thank you for sharing this. I am going to share it on my blog. I hope you consider starting a wiki (if you haven't already) where you can collect and share these great resources.

Lisa Nielsen, The Innovative Educator
Writing about educating innovatively @ http://TheInnovativeEducator.blogspot.com

fivbert said...

Thank you for your suggestions. I enjoy/learn from reading your blog as well. Have a great school year.

tearoof said...

I just discovered your blog, and I'm so glad! The posts really encourage me to think about my impact on students. Thank you for the ideas & resources. May I ask, how did you create the posters- they're fabulous!

fivbert said...

RE: tearoof:

Thank you for your comment.
It was quite easy to make the poster.

The part that took a lot of time was finding "just the right" photo to use. There are so many wonderful creative commons photos on Flickr.

I found photos on Flickr that I thought would show what the quote meant.

Then I saved the photo as a jpeg file.

Then I opened the jpeg photo in MS PAINT.

I made the outside edges of the MS PAINT File large enough to have some extra white space around the photo.

Then I pasted in the information for the Creative Commons Owner information regarding the photo that I used from Flickr.

Then I made the PAINT screen just a bit larger at the bottom or wherever I wanted to place my quote.

I inserted a text box in the area where I wanted the Quote.

Then it was a simple matter of typing in the quote.

Afterwards I could adjust where the words "sat on the page" and make them show off the information to its advantage.

I got my quotes from Will Richardson's blog post regarding questions for his children about "How was school today?" (See link to it in my blog post.)

There are several other poster making programs. My favorite is Big Huge Labs...you may have seen some of them with the black edges around a photo with white words... some large like a title and more words under the "title" to explain.

It is free to use.
bighugelabs.com

You can make one and save it to your computer without signing up/registering.

You can also register as well.

Here are some other places for free poster makers.

www.glogster.com
www.blockposters.com
www.makeuseof.com

Happy Poster Making. Please send me some that you make. I'd like to see them!

tearoof said...

Thanks for the "howto"...I'll give it a try later on, and send you what I've done.
Ruth