The Theme Is: Kids Like Learning When it Involves Talking and Moving

Teaching Theme:  

The Gallery Walk Approach

This was a lesson that my students really enjoyed.  They have made it clear:  they like learning when it involves talking and moving.  Gallery walk for the win!

To set up the gallery walk, they were given two sets of paper:  purple pages with themes and green pages with book summaries.  The colored copy paper really helped to make it obvious which strips of paper were themes and which were texts.  The chunks of text were assigned a letter, which coordinated with a poster on the wall.  They worked together to match the themes to texts.  They were coached on how to disagree in a scholarly way and there was a lot of discussion among group members trying to decide what the theme of each text was. Once the group had decided which theme went with which text, they wrote the text letter on the theme so that they could post it in the appropriate place. 

Around the room there were posters (A through J) for all of the groups to post the theme they had chosen for each text.  Once all of the groups had posted their themes on the posters, we had a gallery walk.  There was a lot of good discussion around the posters as groups noticed that other groups had chosen different themes.  

The exit tickets show the thought processes during the discussion better than I can describe.  Their reflections are invaluable to me.  I am a BIG fan of the exit ticket and I have told my students many times that exit tickets are my favorite papers to "grade". 

Exit Ticket A

I love how this student recognizes that she could have been "on topic" a little more.  

Exit Ticket B

I am pretty sure "reanswering" is not a word, but I liked that "reanswering" leads to more "reanswerings".  I also love the insightful reflection about being more open to other ideas.