The Four C’s of Learning Essay
The cornerstone of becoming a successful learner relies on the availability of a connected classroom model that focuses on four key elements, known as the four C’s of learning. These elements include critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, and communication. A grade four reading class lesson should involve activities for each of the four elements, as illustrated in the subsequent sections.
Critical Thinking
Scholars and educators often heed the contrast between what students think and how to think; they also attempt to monitor their thought processes. Critical thinking skills are essential for fourth graders as it helps them take ownership of their learning process. Other conspicuous characteristics of critical thinking that make this skill a necessity include an enhanced ability to reflect on individual thinking processes and make sound decisions (Slater and Groff 380). An appropriate grade four reading activity that could help establish critical thinking skills in the learners involves providing them with short stories to read and analyze their genre, exposition, purpose, and rising actions in each of the stories. The activity entails reading a short story such as “When Gertrude Grew Great” with the students, then providing them with a worksheet to analyze specific details about the story that lead to the narration’s ending. The specific analysis items include identifying the author’s purpose, genre, the narrator’s point of view, and the story setting and conflict by clarifying the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words. The students will use context clues to clarify meaning before analyzing the story elements. This activity meets the 4.4 standard of learning by using context to clarify the meanings of unfamiliar words.
Creativity
Using the right mix of creativity in reading lessons helps learners to be innovative and encourages them to learn new things. A creative reading activity involves having students identify homophones in sentences through a bingo game. First, the teacher reads out aloud a short story and asks the students to read again individually. Secondly, the students are handed sheets of paper with a list of homophones from the excerpt of the read book. As they reread the book, the learners are required to circle the homophone words they hear from the sheet. At the end of the short story, the students will discuss the words they found. The creative activity will help the learners maintain focus when reading and learn homophones; hence, it meets standard 4.4 b that requires the use of, among others, antonyms and homophones to determine the meaning of new words.
Collaboration
Collaboration teaches learners reading comprehension and analysis while working in small cooperative groups. An appropriate collaborative reading activity involves dividing students into groups of fours and assigning them different paragraphs of a short storybook. Two of the groups will be required to find antonyms in context for specific words circled before the activity. The two other groups will be required to find synonyms in contexts for specific words from the reading passage. Finding antonyms and synonyms meets standards of learning creatively by helping students specialize in vocabulary through reading.
Communication
Teachers use varied approaches to make classroom reading more communicative. One such approach entails integrating reading with other skills so that learners can see its value in the learning process. An appropriate activity that can be used to enhance communication in reading entails assigning students different paragraphs to read by themselves, then requesting them to take turns in communicating to the rest what they read. Communicative classroom reading has the potential to help learners develop the skills they need to read more effectively.
The four C’s identified can be implemented in all subjects and different grade levels. Educators should incorporate the four C’s policies into their instruction to ensure that students adapt and learn successfully in the fast-paced world. School administrators should devise strategies for stressing the importance of these learning elements.
Works Cited
Slater, Wayne H., and James A. Groff. “Tutoring in Critical Thinking: Using the Stases to Scaffold High School Students’ Reading and Writing of Persuasive Text.” Reading & Writing Quarterly, Vol. 33, no.4, 2017, pp. 380-393.
