Today, I'decided to take all the crap piled in my office and put it in one stack. I'm starting at the bottom and working down. I've come to a lovely set of papers torn from a dear friend's spiral and have begun to decipher the purple scribbles.
The teacher was working on making sure that each lesson began with an insightful "hook" or "anticipatory set." She considered this cartoon. But after we worked with the kids, we realized that there was a more powerful beginning. One of the students, after completing the activity, remarked: "I always wondered how you saw all the things that needed to be marked on my paper. Now I can see them for myself."
It reminded me of an old trick mom showed me with lemon juice and a light bulb. (Or maybe I read about it in Encyclopedia Brown and we had to try it out. Apparently, onion juice works too. Ew.) We put the juice on a toothpick and wrote a message. I remember holding the paper over a light bulb and watching the paper turn brown. Wikihow says you can do the same thing with white crayon and watercolor, milk and an iron, baking soda and juice, and one more that you'll just love.
Wouldn't it be fun to start out the class on ratiocination with an activity like that? It would be illuminating to mark all the sentence beginnings and then use one of those techniques to make the distinctions "appear." You'd transition with a comment like, "If I make the marks on your paper, what will you do when I am not here? If you knew there were mistakes, you'd be able to fix them yourselves. Let me show you how to do that kind of thinking for the paper we are working on now."
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