Kindergarten students ask "What is a living thing?"

Following our earlier success with VoiceThread this year where we used it as a summative assessment in our How the World Works unit, one of the teachers in our Techie Breakie group decided she wanted to use it as a formative assessment for the Sharing the Planet unit of inquiry. The central idea of this unit is all living things have needs.

This morning Emily brought her class to the IT lab and we then went to the library and checked out a set of cameras. We had enough cameras that almost every student in the class had one each. We asked the students to walk around the school with us and to take a couple of photos showing living and non-living things. This afternoon we put all the photos into VoiceThread and each student or pair of students talked about what they thought a living thing was, what living things do and what living things need.

Emily now has a good idea of what her students already know and think and she is going to start to address these issues next week and plan for where this inquiry is going to take the students.

Photo Credit: Viability by Spice