PART 2: FINDING PARAMETERS FROM LEARNERS' SENTENCES

This is a continuation from Password Part 1 where Class 4 pupils played the Password game.Password Part 1 Playing

We discussed how we could find a way to help us play the game better (STEP 1) and find more easily relevant features of animals, and this led us to STEP 2 where we tried to build a tool for this purpose. We took the task to a generic level by starting the process of building  a general tool, an ENV, for describing any animal.

As the building of an ENV involves being able to find the features or parameters, of a particular situation or object, the idea of this lesson was to help the pupils to find such parameters, or features, themselves.
The pupils were offered a list of the sentences they themselves had thought up in the previous lesson for describing an animal. They now had to think about what each of these sentences actually tells us about the animal, thus finding the parameter, eg, ‘It’s white.’ The parameter is colour.

The pupils found it hard at first to understand what was meant by the question, ’What does this sentence tell us?’, but they gradually began to get the idea, and we made a list of the parameters they came up with –
colour, home, food and drink, movement, size etc.

TEACHER REFLECTIONS: In retrospect this stage would have been better done by asking them in pairs or groups to sort the sentences. In the past, however, this has taken a long time and has not always been fruitful, so this time I decided to start with a class discussion, and in the next lesson they will have a chance to sort more sentences themselves. The aim was met in that we came up with the parameters. In the next lesson we looked at an ENV model. See Password Part 3 ENV.