October

Systems: This month our CSI focus has been on questioning and eye witness accounts. Students participated in various activities geared toward understanding quality questions in interrogation, the often unreliable nature of eyewitness testimony, and the power of close observation. Students witnessed a theft in our own classroom and used what we learned about composite sketches to make a drawing of the perpetrator. We then looked at some online activities testing their powers of observation and helping them match the suspect with the crime. Try them for yourself!

Art of Crime Detection

Perp Walk

Face Memory

We also used our time to do research into forensic science and the order of events when a crime scene is processed. Students learned about Locard's Principle that criminals always take a trace of something with them and leave a trace of something behind at a crime scene. They also learned about collecting that evidence and how it gets from the crime scene to the courtroom.

Critical and Creative Thinking: Our brain stretch focus has been on word analogies as we built vocabulary and looked for relationships between ideas. Students practiced writing bridge sentences to test for a consistent link between terms.

Try this one for yourself: tornado : scary :: ALERT: _________

A. boring
B. dull
C. green
D. FUN!

We also carried over into figural analogies where they had to apply relationship thinking to compare images.

Habits of Mind: Our main Habit of Mind focus has been on Managing Impulsivity. We read the book Interrupting Chicken by David Ezra Stein and discussed it as a non-example of managing impulsivity, thinking before acting, and using your brain to manage your body. 

We also paired the skill of Gathering Data Through All Senses with our CSI theme to talk about qualitative and quantitative observations and the difference between observations and inferences. 

M^3 (Mentoring Mathematical Minds) Digging for Data: Students were introduced to the term rate and collected data based on their rate of completing some chosen activities. They used this data to ponder the question "what is typical?"

I did a terrible job taking pictures this month. Sorry!