Case study 9: Capturing and recording children’s learning using active learning, Explorify big books, drawing and scribing

Identified need: Jenni wanted to engage all her children so that they could develop their thinking skills and share their ideas in their preferred way. Being able to capture and record their explanations was important, but ultimately Jenni wanted all children to feel independent, confident and have more control over their learning. 

The Approach:  

To support children to confidently use sentences in their verbal answers, Jenni used the same simple sentence stems. These were: 

 I think that… I notice that… because… I wonder…. What if….  

Children practised using the sentence stems during an ‘Explorify week’ to build their confidence. During the Explorify week, Jenni spent ten minutes a day (outside of their science lesson) using Explorify activities to retrieve and embed prior knowledge.  

On some occasions, Jenni scribed sample responses from the class, recording their ideas straight into an Explorify Big Book/ floor book. Jenni also wanted the children to record some of their ideas independently. She was flexible about how this was achieved. 

Sometimes, children collaborated in small groups to write a response which went into the Big Book. 

Sometimes, those who struggled with writing were asked to draw their ideas instead of writing them in their books. This gave Jenni the opportunity to talk to these children and scribe their ideas next to their drawings. 

When there was sufficient time, Jenni incorporated active, social learning strategies into Explorify time. These are similar to some of the ideas described as Kagan strategies. For example, after thinking about the Odd One Out, Shine on! children were asked to move around the room and find one or two people who had chosen the same image to be the odd one out as them. The children were then asked to share their reasons for the image being the odd one out with each other. They were asked to decide as a pair or group which idea linked to the science lesson the most. They then shared this idea with the class. 

Jenni’s reflections:  

I will do an ‘Explorify week’ again because it really helped embed my expectations. Children knew that when they were asked to, “Say it to someone else.” they needed to explain their idea in full sentences using the sentence stems. 

I found the ‘Explorify Big Book’ a valuable record of learning which was easy to use. It is permanently part of our science display so that visitors and children can pick it up and look through it. At the end of the Summer Term, I looked through the book with my children with SEND to revisit their learning. This helped me assess their knowledge and understanding more accurately.  

The combination of using consistent sentences stems and allowing children to draw their ideas has led to all children being able to communicate their ideas more clearly. In some cases, as shown below when we used Frozen in motion, it also encouraged them to write and improve their writing skills.

The active learning ‘Find someone who…’ games worked well with Explorify. The children were highly motivated and it helped them to listen to each other. The technique facilitated peer assessment and I was able to target certain children, check their understanding and support them with recording their ideas. Even a child with very limited spoken English was keen to join in and used actions to explain the phenomenon of ‘reflection’.