Savings and Loans

I've been furthering my eduation by taking Gifted classes and working towards receiving my Gifted Endorsement. This summer in one of my classes I learned about a learning/teaching strategy called, "Savings and Loans." It has nothing to do with money. "Savings," is our schema or knowledge and "Loans," is new learning. My students have been learning about animal special features. We watched an awesome video on Discovery Education about this topic. Once the movie was over I asked students to fold a sheet of paper in half and label one side "Savings" and the other side "Loans." I set a timer for three minutes and they listed as many animal features they could think of on the "Savings" side of their paper. Next we added another learning/teaching strategy from Kagan called, "Mixed-Pair-Share." An idea I picked up through collaborating with a peer, Laura Halloran. Students get up and move to music and partner up when the music stops. I played, "Monster Mash," which makes a great song for mixing. You can see from the pictures below kids love it. When I stopped the music the students partnered up. Each Partner compared their "Savings" lists and looked for words they did not have on their own list. Once they found a new word  they "borrowed" it and added it to the "Loans" side of their list. We mixed-paired and shared several times growing their schema.