This activity continues from the activity “How much did you learn, how much did you remember?”
This activity has two aims. First it helps the children think back to a lesson from a day or two before and recall what they learned. Second it shows them that two people can experience the same thing but remember it in very different ways. It is part of what makes us all so different from each other.
For this activity we need children to work together in pairs, making a learning chart, as described previously, and then looking at each other’s learning chart. Together the pairs of children look for similarities and differences between the two charts.
The task for the children is to see if either of them learned something the other one didn’t. And the aim is for the children to realise that they have both probably learned more than they have written down.
Activity 1: After the children have created their learning charts, select two which are well presented but which show noticeable differences from each other and present them to the class so that all can see the two.
The emphasis here is on showing that everyone ensures that all the class can see what to do.
Activity 2: Ask the children to highlight anything that appears on one learning chart but not in the other.
Several outcomes are possible:
- both children reported learning exactly the same – in which case come back to this session a little later with a lesson that includes more complex learning.
- The children have reported different learning experiences, in which case the child who does not include a topic can be prompted either to say, “Yes I did learn that but I forgot to write it on the list,” or “no I didn’t learn that”.
From here there can be a discussion which is in fact the first step towards the children taking control of their learning and thus starting to influence their ability to recall.
This activity also shows that the children are in fact learning all the time – and that it is easy to forget that they have learned – which is why we need to go back and look again at what they have learned – thus here explaining the concept of “revision”.
The children need to understand that writing down a one-line summary of what they have learned makes it more likely that their young minds will be able to locate the recently learned information and make it available to them when needed.
Most children do not know anything to do with the working of their brains, and so their only thought is that they know something or they don’t know it. What we are trying to do here is introduce the concept that the information is in their mind – but for the moment they can’t find it. However, writing down what they have learned each day does make it easier to find the information they have learned each day.
Thus it is important that the children understand that spending a few minutes each day considering what has been learned, and writing that down, and then comparing their list with that of a friend who was in the same class, really helps their learning.
From this, once the children have become used to the idea that although they are both in the same lesson they remember it in different ways, two more valuable lessons occur.
First, they are prompted to remember elements of a lesson which they have quickly forgotten – and that makes it more likely that this information will be easier to access in the future.
Second, they are taking the first tentative steps towards understanding that we all learn in different ways. Two friends might have both been in the same lesson, but what they remembered was different. And this is, of course, a central part of life. We all of us see the same situation in different ways.
Thus each child might therefore be prompted to ask:
- What did my friend learn that I didn’t?
- Is there a pattern to your remembering? Do you remember certain things better than others?
None of this means that one of them is better than the other – it is just that we all see the world in different ways.
Below is an example of what the two children might write down….
The comparison was between Jon and Farida.
Q1. The main differences in what we learned were:
Jon was slower at saying his 7 times table than Farida
Q2. The reasons for the differences were:
Farida says she just knows the answer to each question in her head immediately, but Jon has to say the times table from the beginning to get to the answer. So for 6 x 7 Farida said 42 but Jon had to say the seven times table from the beginning.
Q3. If you were going through these learning experiences again, would you do anything differently to help your learning?
Jon is learning the square table, as in 2×2, 3×3, 4×4 so he can sometimes start saying a table part way through.
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