Day 1 - Choice-Based classroom (2nd grade)

Day 1:

Describe the class: Today was day one of choice-based exploration. To make things manageable in our 35-minute 2nd grade class we began with just one center, drawing. I went through their previous drawings of "favorite things we like to draw" in their sketchbooks and pulled out some ideas of what type of visual resources I would need to print online to inspire them. I printed black-line images of various flowers, aliens, monsters, clothing, dinosaurs, cars, etc. I displayed and labeled various types of drawing materials such as crayons, pastels, pens, pencils, coloring pencils and markers alongside the visual images in a table I called the "shopping table". Once they sat at their tables and had a few students passing the sketchbooks out I called tables of 4 one by one to shop for their materials and resource images of their choice.

What worked: 1. Students were super excited about being able to draw images related to their interests. Behavior was not an issue and normally this is a very squarely class. 2. children shared images with other children if there were not enough to go around. They took this opportunity to also chat with the child about their subject in common.

What needs to be tweaked: 1. The way in which drawing materials were put away was a bit confusing for kids. Some materials were in separate containers and ready to just be carried off to their tables, while others were in a huge container and needed to be doled out. I need to figure out a way to make all supplies available in the same way to make clean up less confusing. 2. I did not have enough images of some of the "hot" resources such as the Star Wars "how-to's". I need to look over the resources and maybe print more but also perhaps print out variations of the hot topics.

Next Steps: 
* Continue drawing, class is only 35-minutes long and most students did not feel they were done with their drawings.
* In two classes from now embedd a gallery walk in which I will encourage students to walk around and look at other's work and "copy" great ideas from their peers and discuss the idea of "Inspiration". I will also add another component to that where students can go around and write questions on stickies about students' final drawings.