Making up SOLO stories with Year 7 students

I have a new Year 7 intermediate class for Technology. Today we were using SOLO taxonomy to do product research.

Here is the worksheet we were working through together :-

As we were going through all the levels of SOLO and explaining what each of them meant, we were referring to this poster that is on the walls of every class room at Tamaki College. I was pointing to each of the diagrams and getting the students to describe them.  We were then coming up with answers to the research questions together. Part of what we did today was try to really understand what each of the levels MEAN. To help this, we came up with a story.....

• Unistructural is a lonely little yellow block in the playground. He is by himself.
• Multistructural is lots of little green blocks in the playground. The are wandering around alone, not talking to each other.
• Relational is lots of little blue blocks walking round the playground with their arms linked. They are talking and telling each other what they like to do, eat, watch on TV etc ... They start to move themselves into groups of blocks who like to do the same things so they can tell stories to each other.
• Extended Abstract is little purple blocks of bricks who all discover that they like ice cream and plan a trip next weekend to the Tiptop factory.

We had fun coming up with this story and two of my lovely students today made this for me when they got back to their own school after their Technology lesson.