Candy Inventions: A Collaborative Jigsaw Activity That Involves All Learners

Today’s elementary school classrooms are composed of learners with a wide range of reading and writing skills. As teachers, we face the challenges of engaging all our students in the learning process and of designing inclusive lessons that meet their needs in a supportive, empathetic and nurturing manner.

This lesson focuses upon a fun “jigsaw” activity designed for primary grade students. It draws upon their creativity, extends their imaginations, and has proven to work well in involving English language learners in the mainstream classroom. Jigsaw is a cooperative learning technique that promotes student collaboration, enhances language acquisition, involves language learners in the completion of learning tasks, and provides a vehicle for creating a common focus.

The jigsaw technique was first introduced by Elliot Aronson, a social psychologist, in 1971. Along with his graduate students at the University of Texas and the University of California, he developed the jigsaw classroom as a situation of mutual interdependence. Each student played a unique role in the completion of a group assignment and then had an opportunity to learn from his/her peers. Over the years, teachers have developed many variations to the traditional jigsaw structure and modified it to suit their own classroom programming, size of groups, and range of topics. A personal variation that I have developed for the Candy Inventions activity involves children actually creating a jigsaw puzzle. While enabling each student in the group to specialize in one aspect of the puzzle, all group members must work together to fit the pieces into a whole picture.

The lesson follows the reading of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. The story revolves around a poor, young boy named Charlie Bucket who wins a tour through the most magnificent candy factory in the world—a factory that is owned by the eccentric Mr. Willy Wonka. This lesson can be completed over the course of a week, depending upon the reading and writing levels of the students in the class.

Acknowledgments
A heartfelt thank you to Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji and Vaheguru Ji for ongoing guidance and support.


Sukhdeep Kaur Chohan
Sukhdeep Kaur Chohan is a passionate elementary school teacher with the Peel District School Board in Ontario. She has taught in suburban outer city schools in London England and village schools in Punjab, India. Her research has been published in numerous national and international journals around the world and focuses upon enriching children’s learning at the elementary school level.


This article is from Canadian Teacher Magazine’s Mar/Apr 2013 issue.

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