Today I incorporated Peter Worley's The Concept Box framework into a reading lesson. Below are the different sections of The Concept Box, the steps I took at each section and some responses from the children.
1. I first had the children read the text silently to themselves. The text we read was Want Relief by Paul Mason (School Journal Level 3, May 2020). Some themes that appear through the text include survival, loyalty, resilience and responsibility.
2. Comprehension Stage: This stage of the Concept Box allows the children to discuss the text openly.
The children pair up to first discuss the text. I noticed that who children paired up with made a huge difference to the 1:1 discussions that were had. At this point of the lesson, the children were not openly sharing ideas - coming up with ideas appeared to be difficult for the children. This stage of The Concept Box really supported the children's confidence in sharing ideas and beginning to think about the meaning of the text.
Some of the comments made by the children:
- "They thought the bird in the story was giving them clues."
- "I think the bird was giving memories about the ship they had been on."
- "I think I agree with ______ because it said something about a ship wreck. They may have gone to the cold island by crashing the ship. Bird may have given memories to create the small version of the boat. Like a message."
- "Is this story true or false?"
- "They needed fire because it was winter and it gave them warmth."
- "It was a cold island."
Concept Fishing: This stage scaffolds the children to begin thinking more critically about the text.
During this phase, children had to think of one word each to describe the story. Once everyone had shared, other words could then be shared.
Words the children came up with:
Remember
Memory
Survival
Scary
True
Stranded
Feelings
Emotions
Historic
Life
Eternity
Hope
Trust
Faithful
Struggle
Luck
Relief
Parrot
The children did a really good job of thinking critically about the text at this early level of the lesson. Interestingly, some responses still suggested a superficial level of thinking (scary, parrot).
Concept Funnelling and Explore Central Concepts: Narrow down the words to just 5 - supporting children to really think about which words best describe the situation in the text | Arguing for/against one of these words.
For the first time this year, I gave the pen over to one of the children so they were the ones in control of the choosing and eliminating of words. This small action made the discussion so much more rich. The child who I gave the pen to stepped up to lead, as did one of the other children who took it upon himself to lead votes when decisions were struggling to be made over particular words.
Here are some of the comments that were made by children in the discussion to reduce the number of words:
- "I agree that parrot shouldn't be there because it doesn't go deep enough."
- "Wait. You need to have a reason. You can't just take it out." - REALLY good argument.
- "Faithful is kind of like Trust. "I have faith in you/ I trust you." "
- "Keep stranded because they were stranded on an island."
- "Feelings is emotion so we only need to keep on. Let's have a vote."
It was awesome to see the kids who stepped up as leaders during this section. The children were having some very rich discussions.
- "0ooo, Hope is a good one." -For this comment, I had to encourage the children to say WHY.
- "You need hope to survive."
A challenge I am going to have with including The Concept Box Framework into the classroom is the length of time it takes. We didn't get to the final part which is to have a really rich discussion for and against the 5 final words. However, the discussions we had in the section we got to were really rich and getting to this point would suffice if it was happening regularly.
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