The Concept Box (Peter Worley) - Attempting this in class

Today I trialled using the Concept Box, a teaching strategy which comes from Peter Worley's book, Once upon an if. It was a huge success! The children were engaged and I saw a vast difference in the amount of critical thinking occurring. We trialled it using the poem, The Square that Didn't Fit In, on page 172 of Once upon an if. Here are some of my observations/ notes from the learning experience. I have broken it up into the different elements of the Concept Box.

Comprehension Stage
Here are some of the comments that children made and questions they asked in this open conversation about the text:

- Couldn't the monster eat small circles? They'd fit.
- How did the monster get fooled?
- There are those crackers called shapes which come in lots of different shapes and sizes.
- Started talking about which shape they would like to be.

Lots of questions were asked by the children during this comprehension stage. I need to remind myself to sit back and observe rather than take part in the conversation.

Concept Fishing
Most children found this section of the Concept Box difficult. One child did a really good job of describing text however used a lot of detail. Here are the words they came up with to describe the text:

Different
Dumb
Confused
Personality
Confident
Life
Circle
Feeling
Purpose
Inside-out
Normal

Concept Funnelling
I got a bit confused at this point and combined this section with the final Exploring central concepts section. Next time, I will work at splitting these two sections up.  I need to remember that this section gives children a chance to share which one word they think is the best and why. Once have shared 5 words, move onto the last section.

The children gave some great explanations for and against the above words. We then filtered it down to:

Different
Normal
Personality
Purpose
expressing
feeling

 The children found it really trick to get the list down to five words. They finally decided to take 'feeling' out as they felt 'expressing' incorporated 'feeling.'

Next time, I will do a better job of splitting up Concept Funnelling and Exploring central concepts.