A-Ha Moments
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"Books, to the reading child, are so much more than books. They are dreams and knowledge. They are a future and a past" –Esther Meynell, author, 1940
In our personal and professional lives, we have all experienced the joy of an A-Ha Moment: a realization that we have just discovered something that is meaningful for us. The moment is often accompanied with a feeling of satisfaction, pleasure, or accomplishment. A-Ha Moments tend to stay with us for a long time.
Maybe you’ve had the privilege of seeing a student experience an A-Ha Moment: You can almost see a light bulb turn on over his or her head. There is an “Oh, I get it!” feeling that goes along with that moment.
This month PLS shares a way to capture these A-Ha Moments as opportunities for your students to make connections with the content they have learned and share with others in the class.
The learning strategy below is used in the PLS graduate course Learning to Read: Beginning Reading Instruction™.
Strategy: A-Ha Cards
Materials Needed: One A-Ha Card for each student in your class
Cards can be created from sheets of colored cardstock cut into fourths or from plain paper that your students provide. If you provide cardstock, add a graphic (perhaps a light bulb) to drive home the point that A-Ha Moments are special.
A-Ha Cards give your students an opportunity to personalize the information they have learned and share any insights they have had.
You can use A-Ha Cards at any time in your classroom. There might be formal times you want to use them, or you might choose to make them available to students for any new ideas or strategies that are generated during your time together. A-Ha Moments should not be forced or contrived. Remember that an A-Ha Moment is something meaningful and individual, and is definitely something to celebrate.
Some students may come up with their own A-Has, and others may require a little bit of prodding.
Here are some sample questions you might pose to foster an A-Ha:
What insights did you gain or what did you learn?
What connections did you make?
How is what we learned today similar to (or different from) what we learned in the previous unit?
What did you find most interesting or memorable?
Some teachers let their students come up with A-Ha Moments at some point during a unit of study and put students in small groups to share their A-Ha Moments with one another. One student’s A-Ha Moment may trigger an A-Ha for someone else.
Content is most meaningful to students when they can personalize or connect with it. By giving them the opportunity to share their connections to the content, the A-Ha Moment can become even more meaningful in their minds. After sharing, A-Ha cards can be passed back to individual students or posted on the wall as a reminder of how many light bulbs have been turned on in your classroom.
Source: The above tips are based on PLS's graduate course Learning to Read: Beginning Reading Instruction™. For more information see "Featured Graduate Course" to the right.
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