Practicing Thinking and Explaining Logically Part1: Secrets of Food
Elementary School Grade 3, 3-4 students per tablet
āLetās Make a Digital Book: Secrets of Foodā
Kouhei Kato used a research task on food to help his students develop their expository or explanatory writing skills.
Outline of the Class
After confirming that students understood the ābeginning - middle - endā writing structure for explanatory texts, they were asked to create a text in which the āmiddleā explained how their chosen staple food such as wheat, potatoes, rice, fish, milk, sugar cane, etc. is transformed or processed to make other food products.
The āmiddleā had to be composed of multiple paragraphs with students required to make a new Card for each new paragraph. Students were tasked to connect their paragraphs with appropriate use of conjunctions and connectives in order to create an overall coherent, structured text. Each student had to write about three different examples and as much as possible each example was supposed to use a different cooking method.
Next, students worked together in a group to create one final group presentation. They were allowed to use pictures and photographs to make the text more accessible and some groups even brought in actual photographs of their meals at home. Finally, they added audio voice recordings to the Cards of the final version of their explanation.
Benefits for Students
Through thinking about and researching the transformations and diffusion of their chosen food, students honed their data gathering and research as well as judgement and analytical skills. The ability to use other multimedia tools such as drawings, photographs and voice in addition to text helped students to understand the value of using visual aids to make explanations to an audience more easily understandable and further improved their powers of creativity and expression. Best of all, the task also piqued studentsā interest in food and contributed to cultivating their spirit of inquiry and investigation.
