Lauren S.⼁Life Lessons! When Learning and the Real World Collide
Our 1:1 approach to education means that every lesson is customized to incorporate student interests and fit the needs of each student, each class. As an expert K-5 teacher, Lauren harnesses student’s innate curiosity and inspires them through hands-on and interactive activities.
What do we do when we need to know how to get somewhere? What do we do when we need to know how to fix something? What do we do when we need to check the ingredients for what we are making for dinner? We look it up. We find instructions. Maybe we watch a YouTube video or two. We seek procedures daily to complete tasks and solve problems. Our students are already familiar with procedures because procedural writing is all around us! But how do our students go about writing procedures? That is the question we set out to answer in my third grade literary analysis and writing class.
Procedural writing can be a fun and engaging topic for elementary students. It is exciting, interesting, and relevant. As teachers, we have the opportunity to be creative with this topic and to design imaginative, hands-on lessons for our students. With our format of one-on-one learning at Pacific Prep, procedural writing can be especially customized to our student’s interests and learning goals.
To dive into this topic, we started with a lunchtime classic: the peanut, butter, and jelly sandwich. I had my student write the materials and the steps to make this sandwich from memory. She tried to be as specific, detailed, and descriptive as possible. Then, it was time for her to make her sandwich based on what she just wrote. As she made her sandwich, she followed her directions exactly as she wrote them. Through this process, she realized what details she needed to add, where she could be more specific or descriptive, and what she needed to change to make each of the steps explicitly clear to the reader. The outcome of this process was two-fold: a refined procedure that accurately reflected the process of making a PB & J and my student had just made her lunch for the next day!
We expanded upon this process in our next lesson when we baked chocolate chip cookies. My student and I worked through the steps of the recipe together, each baking in our respective kitchens. As we moved through the recipe, we made note of the steps that could be more specific or descriptive. Following our baking day, we analyzed the recipe for what we thought worked and what parts we thought could be improved.
By exploring procedural writing in this way, our learning goals were accessible, engaging, and exciting. My student was thrilled to dive into our learning because it tapped into her love of baking and allowed her to be hands-on in her learning. And what better way to end a lesson than with a delicious, warm chocolate chip cookie!
A note from our Faculty Manager: Lauren’s enthusiasm and creativity make her an instant family and staff favorite at PacPrep. She is an expert at crafting hands-on activities that are centered around student’s interests and transferable life-long skills. Her warm and welcoming classroom environment encourages students to take academic risks and to challenge themselves into creating high quality, polished projects.