Do your students use their brains? Freebie alert!!

I had an awesome planning meeting at the beginning of last week. We usually have release planning meetings (on site meetings that are half a day with our grade level and administrators). Part of our meeting was focused on how to help our students learn at their highest level. Isn't that what we all want to do?

Well, I had a brain storm during that meeting about having my students explain their thinking. I figure this is possible even in Kindergarten! When I was in college, one of my professors had us do Think-Pair-Shares and we had to draw what our experiment or activity had been. Based on these two things, I came up with these sheets:

Brain Book Full Page

My students have used this once already and it went really well. We did a math activity with estimating how many huffs and puffs it would take to blow a toothpick off their desks. We did fill it out together but I'm thinking that after a couple of times, they will be able to do it independently. The top section is for what they think will happen, the middle for what they did, and finally for what they found out.

Here's a half sheet in case you want to use this with older kids in a journal of some sort. That had been my original idea until I printed it and realized that most of my pumpkins can't write that small yet :)

Brain Book

I hope you enjoy your freebies and are able to use them to get your kids thinking!

Have a blessed day,