I wrote about this topic last year here. And like last year, I started my weather unit today with the same activity. But that doesn’t mean that our experience was the same. I have a different group of kiddos, with different knowledge and understanding, and I gave a different set of directions of how this protocol would work. So yes, it’s similar, as many things are year-to-year, but it’s not nearly the same.
As with most every unit we begin, we start with vocabulary words that students will need to know. Today we used the protocol List-Group-Label to do this introduction. Here’s the big idea of how it works:
So, like I mentioned before, I had a couple of added directions this time around that helped further thinking. When tribes got to the GROUPing part, rather than tell them how to make their poster look, we talked about how they needed to make a decision about the best kind of graphic organizer to use for their information. I also took this opportunity to introduce the phrase “You gotta build the house before you decorate it.” We talked about how you could “fancy” up your poster if you had some time at the end, but that the most important thing was to get your thinking down first, to show what you know about weather in an organized way.
We spent about 10 minutes on the list-group-label part, then took a short gallery walk to each tribe’s poster. As they visited other posters, they were to notice what words others used, how they organized their thinking, and if there were any ideas they could “steal” to add to their own sheet once they returned. After spending about 30 seconds at each poster, they had two minutes to tweak their own work before we were finished.
It was great to hear them work together in their groups to put words together, and think about how they could label each category. Look at it in progress:
And then here is what we ended up with after our work time:
The Legendary 4
The Crazy Dragons (they even signed their work with their tribe name!)
The SBF
The J.A.A.Zicles
The Wild Spirits
Please leave us a comment and let us know what you think. We’d love to continue to learn with you. What other words would you suggest we put on our lists?
20somethingkids and 1kookyteacher 
Hi Ms. Bearden,
Do you mind taking me off your email list? It’s kind of fun to see what you’re doing with your class this year, but I should probably focus on what’s going on with Nunes’ kids!
Hope you’re having a good year.
Lydia
Sure–I will try. Hope your year is off to a great start!
I love how the groups visualized the groupings differently!
Hello, I am doing a project on list, group and label and I was wondering if you gave your students the labels of the groups or if they thought of them themselves. With the labels, were they apart of the words listed or were they separate?
Hi! First of all thanks for your comment! :). I did not give them anything except the prompt to think about words. They made their lists and then figured out how they should be grouped and then decided on the labels for those groups. This was when I taught 5th grade, so when I do it with 1st or 2nd graders I provide a little more support with the grouping and labeling part, but still try to keep it kid-led so that they are the ones responsible for making the connections and figuring out what we should call the groups. Does that make sense? What are you doing your project for?