Active Exploration December 5, 2012

Today in our PLC we reflected on our work this week around the celebration of Hanukkah. We talked about how students connected the new information to their own experiences with celebrations, how they began to understand new vocabulary like "tradition" and "symbol", and areas we would like to further explore in the weeks to come. In the following weeks we will be researching other winter celebrations such as Kwanzaa, Chinese/Vietnamese New Year, Eid, and Christmas; so spending this time looking back on our first go at the research process with this group of kids was very valuable. As we learn more about each of these holidays we would like to have students start to compare the similarities and differences among them. We have introduced the Venn diagram as a means of sorting information and ideally would like students to use this as a method of comparison in the coming weeks.