Connecting to our Learning... Finding out how success criteria can really help us in our learning

We have been thinking about what makes learning easier. To understand how to make a complex task easier we decided to use our knowledge of success criteria to make something challenging... like balloon dogs!

                                          

Our teacher had spectacularly failed in her attempt to make a balloon dog some years ago so it was a good experiment to see if a list of criteria could even help an adult.

All of the students helped write up the success criteria after watching the process modelled:

• Get a picture of a dog in your mind - draw it if it helps you remember the sequence: nose- head- ears- neck - front legs- body and back legs.
  
• Start with the nose (that is the balloon knot)
• Twist a head
• Twist one ear the size you want, then bring down the balloon to match the size of the first ear, twist again, and twist the ears together to join them securely (at the narrow part) 
• Twist the balloon to make the neck 
  
• Make the first front leg and then it's matching pair. Do the joining twist.
• Create the body then twist and create the back legs just the same way as the front legs - with that joining twist again
• The leftover part of the balloon becomes the tail! 

Could every person be successful following the success criteria...... absolutely!

http://photopeach.com/album/16f70rv

http://photopeach.com/album/16f70rv

Some other things also helped us:

•  working with a peer
•  giving each other feedback and feedforward
•  persisting