Using SOLO Hexagons to assess prior vocabulary knowledge.

I had my new Year 9 class for a double period today. We have started our clock design project and all we have done so far is to collect images of different types of clock.
What we moved onto today was a kind of pretest (without them knowing that's what it was) to see where they are in their vocabulary knowledge. We used SOLO hexagons to write down everything they could see in their collection of clock images. We then grouped them together in groups of their own choice and they had to explain why they had put the groups together.
The students worked in pairs for the activity and we all had a go together at the start, with them calling out suggestions to the whole class.

This gave me a lot of insight into the variation of the knowledge around the class. One student came up with the word "analogue" and "digital" with no prompting while others struggled to know what the hands of the clock were called.

I hope that starting early with the vocabulary like this, it will help them later when we start to describe their design ideas.

Here is the work we did today ....