Making Our Own SOLO Taxonomy Rubrics

Today my class made their own SOLO rubrics. They had to think of something they were amazing at or something they knew a lot about. They had to write a rubric for it, saying what each level might look like. 

We discussed the difference between declarative and functional knowledge and I showed them what a generic functional knowledge and declarative knowledge rubric looked like, they had lots of discussions in their talking groups where they helped each other decide on the different levels of thinking. Then off they went to write their own. A few of the boys decided to use minecraft. One of the girls in my class had asked them what minecraft was and we had talked about her having Prestructural knowledge about minecraft and that I had Unistructural knowledge because I could place blocks on top of each other but that was all I knew because I couldn't even work out how to move.

Above is the rubric that Joel developed.

This was a great activity to help them to connect SOLO to a something personally meaningful. Some needed more scaffolding but it was great working through it with them and seeing the connections taking place. It also was great for their pride and being able to celebrate individual strengths.

Then....... when I checked twitter this afternoon (I am a new fan of twitter for professional purposes) this HookED: SOLO minecraft clip appeared...... How about that for timing. I can't wait to show my children tomorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XrxiHHHaQA&feature=youtu.be&noredirect=1

The other awesome thing that came out of this was that some children wanted to prove that they were at an Extended Abstract level for this. Jack who wrote a declarative rubric about insects went off to draw a plan for an insect egg hatching box and Taylor who also wrote a declarative rubric about Geronimo Stilton went off to write a new chapter after I asked her what she thought might happen next in the story she was reading. You can just imagine how motivated these children were to independently go off and do this. I sneakily threw in some success criteria (as you do) like using full stops and capital letters correctly and using labels on the plan. 

Great Day! Thanks Bridget Casse for giving me this idea.

Jack's Insect Egg Hatching House:

Year 2's Discovering What Happens To Light As It Passes Through A Prism Success through using SOLO to understand the Science concept of light energy. Before each session we looked at the rubric and talked about what we would need to do to 'move up the ladder'. We would talk about what we already understood about light. I would then pose a question e.g. "what might happen if I hold a prism in the light?" and they would move off to do the experiment. I would facilitate by asking them to describe what they see happening and prompt discussions by asking "why?" Information was fed in through reading science texts and watching youtube clips. The children were beginning to have a great understanding about the light refracting through the glass but I wanted them to connect this to other experiments we did about refraction of light through water.  I wrote key words from across the topic, on hexagons and arranged them on the mat. The children manipulated the hexagons. They joined hexagons together if they could make a connection. They would then explain why they had connected the hexagons. This activity gave them visual prompts to connect their ideas and extended their thinking to another context. The children used a cause and effect map to record their thinking and had a rubric as a visual aide during writing. Their map became their planning. Overall I feel that using the hexagons  really helped the children to connect their newly acquired knowledge (light bending through a glass prism and the colours separating) to the knowledge gained through prior experiments (light bending through water). It was as if you could see little light bulbs go on.