Discussion 3

Part 1:

Last week we had the Egyptian version of Cinderella.  It was a great story because it put a new twist and culture, on a classic fairy tale.  After reading the story I believe some great higher-order thinking questions to ask my students would be:

•  Can you distinguish between Rhodopis and the other slave girls?
• Who was it that gave Rhodopis the slippers? Why?
•  How would you have handled the other slave girls forcing their chores off onto you?
•  Which is true or false: the Pharaoh finds Rhodopis’s shoe in his garden while he is out picking flowers?
•  How could the story have changed if the Pharaoh had not found Rhodopis’s shoe?
•  How was this similar to the original Cinderella?

Part 2:

My group has decided to create a unit based on the solar system for the upper elementary grades (3^rd-5^th).  We really hope to focus on all four of these understandings in that they are the key to helping our students understand and reach their goals.  We hope to create factual knowledge through our smaller lessons within the unit.  In these lessons we will provide the students with resources and classifications, which will help them create concrete facts in their minds.  We hope to create procedural knowledge through our projects and activities.  Our students will perform tasks such as calculating the distance between the planets and documenting each phase of the moon’s cycle.  These tasks will help our students get a better grasp on what they are learning through working with the material.  We also hope to generate conceptual knowledge through incorporating the unit’s major concepts that cover more than one subject area.  If we can do this our students will be able to generate thoughts and connections between their different class subjects.  Our generalization/ essential understandings will hopefully give our students an overview of what we are going to be learning and help them to define the main ideas.  One essential understanding I have thought of for our unit is: Over time many different cycles take place within our solar system.