Fictional Stories in Science
Using Fictional Stories as a Pathway to Science Content
Cultural Fabric: Follow-Up
About a month ago, I shared a Cultural Fabric activity that I invited my school to participate in. Please see my post Cultural Fabric: Class Building Activity for more information, including a link to a PDF for instructions.
To my delight, they did 🙂, and I am here to share with you some of those results!
Each grade level team (there are two per grade at the middle school where I teach) shared this idea with their advisory class. I really appreciated how the teachers embraced the activity and saw the activity as an invitation to have a class discussion about cultures, about differences, about togetherness…about our strength.
Once the “us” squares were collected, they were turned into “quilts” that were displayed during the week of conferences (and are still up today!). Here are some of those images:
Sadly, I was not at school during conferences to see and capture the initial thoughts and emotions (I was presenting at the NSTA Area Conference in Salt Lake), but many of my colleagues mentioned how wonderful the experience was, and how well it was received. One of my teammates expressed that many students had their parents capture their picture next to their piece of their team quilt. Yay! Happy!
Also, I want to say thank you to you…my viewers! I noticed on my blog data, that this activity was a popular “view”. Thank You! I do hope you share it (and this site) with your teammates as a possible future idea.
And…to help you do that, I made an additional PDF that provides instructions for students, rather than the PDF I originally wrote for teachers, to capture the idea.
My school wants to do it again next year, which will give us time to think of a new key…perhaps a genetics based one. 🙂
Happy Sharing, Communicating, and Embracing Differences!
–Kalynda
Fictional Stories in Science 