Sharing Our Summative Assessments with the School Community

Hi all,

In a PYP school, we are encouraged to involve the community in our learning. I wanted to share how we included our school community while doing the summative assessment task for our How We Organise Ourselves unit this past year with grade 4 (8-9 year olds). We were very much inspired by our incredible grade 1 teacher. For their How We Express Ourselves unit, they had an art exhibition in our school gym and invited members of the school community to come and see it. Those grade 1 students were absolute super stars!

Our central idea was "Economic activities and the natural environment are interconnected." The task was to create a tourist information stand about a region in Italy, showing the interconnectedness between the activities of the region and the natural environment. Students collaborated in pairs for this task. 

We had been learning how to do persuasive writing so students made brochures, encouraging people to visit this region. We also integrated mathematics by having the students research the weather in the region and make a double bar graph based on the average temperature or rainfall. For homework, the previous week, students interviewed people from different regions of Italy. They shared their findings with the relevant group. They then created posters and digital presentations to explain how the economic activities affect the environment and vice/versa. 

We invited their parents and other students to come to our "Bella Italia Tourist Expo." Each pair set up their tourist information stand while parents, teachers and students browsed around. Both my teaching partner and I had a very feel-good morning that day. The students were fantastic communicators and really got to show off how knowledgeable they were about their region of Italy. This project took over a week but the students were engaged all the way through. We felt that, knowing they would be sharing their research findings with the school community, they were a lot more engaged than if the summative assessment task was less visible.

Here are some pictures to give you an idea of how it looked!