I am just about to embark on new units of work with all my classes, and am wondering how to use the ENV routine. In response to your question last time Alexander, I don`t think that I did focus on this clearly enough last time and so am trying to think about how to incorporate it better this time.
As with the last unit of work, in the first couple of lessons I want the students to understand what are the characteristics are of mosaics (g6) and to find out what they know about global warming (g7) at the start of the units of work.
Technology is contriving against me this week (no functioning colour printers in the school, and the dvd I wanted to use as an introduction for my grade 7`s wouldn`t play) but assuming that everything technological functions as it should, I am thinking about using a couple of other thinking routines to get started - Headlines (if you were to write a headline for this topic or issue right now that captured the most important aspect that should be remembered, what would that headline be?) and Connect /Extend/Challenge. These are good routines to establish prior knowledge and to give a base line for measuring how their thinking has developed over the course of the unit.
I hope to do a sorting task using colour images of mosaics but I could do with suggestions for how to make ENV clearer or ideas for a task other than sorting that would incorporate ENV.