Skillful Teacher - What Have I Learnt Today?

According to "Skilful teacher", what happens in the beginning and at the end of the lesson is what people tend to retain the longest. I always begin my lesson with lesson objectives. I need to use the last 10 minutes of the lesson effectively.


Today, I conducted a lesson on electrical conductors with the Primary 5 pupils. At the beginning of the lesson, I shared with the pupils the lesson objective -  Pupils are to identify and classify electrical conductors and insulators. Pupils were given bulbs. batteries and wires to design a circuit tester to test whether the items given conduct electricity. At the end of the lesson, I got pupils to summarise with the following guiding questions.

• What Have I Learnt Today?
• What Puzzled me?

I got these ideas from skilful teacher. I used to dislike using " What Have I Learnt Today?"  because pupils always like to write general statements which do not show understanding, for example, I learnt about conductors etc.


But after the lesson today, I have changed my perception on this question. It can also draw out pupils' misconception.


One of the pupil  wrote the following:

I did not know aluminium can conduct electricity as I always think  that only metals can conduct electricity.

This pupil have the misconception that aluminium is not a metal. She has the prior knowledge that metals are hard but what she was handling today is aluminium foil which is soft.

This response gave me great insight on making use of this strategy.