Synthesizing

This week we have continued to work on synthesizing. Synthesizing is the idea that our thinking needs to change based on what we see around us. In a book the text makes our thinking change. This week Ms. Cavallaro has taught some great lessons to help the students understand and practice synthesizing.

Today was my favorite lesson. Ms. Cavallaro showed the class a painting by Alexandre Hogue from his Erosion Series.

When we looked at the painting, we looked at four different quadrants before we looked at the picture as a whole. The first quadrant we saw was the top left. Most of the class including myself saw an ocean scene. Then we looked at the second quadrant and the third quadrant and then the fourth quadrant. The students wrote down how their thinking changed each time that we looked at a different part of the painting. Finally we showed the class the whole picture and they wrote again about how their thinking changed now that they could see the big picture.

I loved the lesson especially the connection that Ms. Cavallaro made at the end. She talked about a character from Half a Chance. In the beginning of the book this character did not seem like a good character. As we kept reading the book our thinking about this character changed as we noticed different ways the character interacted with the characters. Finally at the end of the book we were able to look back and look at this character's whole picture. We realized she was not a bad person she just had made some mistakes. The way we thought about this character was just like the way we looked at the painting today. 

If you are reading at home you can practice synthesizing using some of these thinking stems:

• Now I understand...
• I'm changing my mind about...
• I used to think ________, but now I think...
• My new thinking is...
• I'm beginning to think...

Hope you are all having a great week.