Grand Conversations

 Describe how you would establish a literature circle "grand conversation." Choose the book, describe the teachable moments from the book and how you would establish and facilitate a grand conversation.

There are many books in the elementary grade school that can spark a great "grand convo". One book I found in particular is call "What a Waste: Trash, Recycling and Protecting our Planet" by Jess French. This book has many discussions that we could talk about. Recycling is something everyone should know about, especially younger students. I find that there are a lot of teachable moments in this book. Example one, what recycling is? Most classrooms I have been in have a recycling box mainly used for papers, but also water bottles, milk cartons, etc. This could be a perfect example to point out to your students at the beginning of the book. Moving on to where it talks about pollution, this is also something students can engage in conversation about. If you live in bright light areas, it can help teach the students what it means about lights at night. Talking about Earth's resources in this book is a very important part as well as the entire book. I think when we get to the page about all of Earth's resources like, fossil fuels, wood, water, and minerals, it can help facilitate student understanding and learning on the topic we have. This would be a good book to read for when it is warmer outside, maybe as a class we could go outside and see how much trash we can pick up, then discuss what kind of trash we saw. The students could also have grand conversations on what certain things on Earth are recyclable or not. Recycling can be tricky because somethings go to different spots, or buckets, etc. and that is what we need to have conversations about too with this book. Students could do a project about Earth and its resources to help the students with their understandings. Having conversations about Earth and how recycling is a important part to keep our Earth clean, can lead into a very big grand conversation. This book has many teachable moments like I had said before, I believe teaching about recycling, wasting, the three R's (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) all have very good meanings to teach. I can see myself teaching about the three R's, mainly because we could take this lesson into the outdoor world and make it very hands on. I think for a lesson like this you could have a grand conversation about the three R's and what it means to students. From that grand conversation, we could move into a hands on activity, after that it could be a good idea to revisit the grand conversation we had, to see if anything had changed or if the students wanted to add any new information they might of found. Kids brains are learning so much all the time that these grand conversations are good to have,  not only to come back to what we were talking about, but to keep the students on track. Grand conversations do not always have to be in a big group, they could also be in small settings possibly, depending on what you want to be going over. Starting a grand conversation at the beginning of the lesson would be a very good introduction to what you will be learning about. Having a grand conversation at the end of the lesson is also good because you can hear what the students have learned and see if they have any new information. Going back to the book I found, "What a Waste: Trash, Recycling and Protecting our Plant", like I had previously said, it is good to have a book with many conversation starters in it, like this one. You might also not want to start with a grand conversation and just read the book, do the activity, then do the grand conversation, I think that way you get more information, but maybe a slower start.

Overall, grand conversations are very important to have no matter what lesson, or what you plan to be doing with your students. You can also have them just to have them! I will share the read aloud I found for this post. I think it could be very helpful in the future to use. Remember, always recycle to help our beautiful Earth. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y18sB-oBsbU