Schema Schtuff: A FREEBIE!

Hey, friends!  It’s been ca-razy up in here! As usual!  After Nashville, I contracted a really fun upper-respiratory infection that basically flattened me out for a few days.  I lost my voice and about 90% of my energy.  I haven’t slept so much in a really long time, but I guess my body really needed it.  I am starting to make a comeback, so I wanted to take a few moments to play catch-up with my very neglected blog.  🙂

Now, as this post title suggests… we’ve been working on some schema schtuff  stuff!  😉  I drew the outline of a person’s head, and I had my students come up to the anchor chart to add something they knew… their prior knowledge… to the chart.  When they wrote a fact, they also glued a tissue paper square to the inside of her head.  After all, schema is the stuff in our heads…if you boil it all down.  We discussed how it sticks with us.  To tie into to the sticky-factor, I pulled out a lint roller that was covered in schema, and each student created a schema web of their own around an image of a lint roller.  Sadly, I didn’t remember to take photos.  Epic fail, eh?

I pulled out my file cabinet, and I explained how our brain organizes our schema like a file cabinet organizes papers.  I even talked to them about how learning physically changes our brain.  We had a talk about dendrites… and we talked about how our schema is organized and stored inside of our heads.  Then, we made our own schema files. If you think you can use this freebie with your own kiddos, feel free to download it HERE!

The following song is from my Strategy Songs: Metacognition Through Music pack!  We sang the song multiple times to really make sure that it would live in my students’ brains forever.   They noted that if we sang it over and over again, it would become part of their schema.  Success!

In other news. everything in my TpT shop is 15% off through tomorrow evening!  Happy Columbus Day, friends!