Ramsay's Class Chalk Talk

Thinking about a quote can seem boring, but at the Ramsay Chalk Talk, we started to comprehend the real meaning of them. A Chalk Talk is an activity where everyone in the room actively participates in a conversation without actually talking. Each person gets a dry erase marker and we respond to a quote and to one another's ideas. For our first Chalk Talk, we used this quote from Malala.

 

"Let us make our future now, and let us make our dreams tomorrow's reality. " - Malala. 

After reading the quote to ourselves, we would take a dry erase marker and draw a line from a word in the quote and write what it meant to us. What made it a challenge was we couldn't talk. We would comment off of other peoples' ideas on a word and that started a conversation without even talking! This activity took up the ENTIRE wall (and most of the class time)! There was so much writing that some people had to stand on chairs to write something more. 

Everybody in our class really, really enjoyed it and would love to do it again! It took time, patience, and not a lot of talking to complete this task. After we were done we stood back and took a look at what we accomplished. We pointed out some interesting comments that we found and talked about them. When we looked back at what we did, we were astonished by how much thought we had put into this activity and how much we learned from everyone's perspectives. We would love to this again, and we would recommend it for other classes.  

PS: Yes, we write on the wall! It's painted with Idea Paint which turns the entire back classroom wall into a dry erase board. How cool is that?

~Maddie & Sophia