Strengths and Interests

On Friday morning and Monday morning we talked a lot about our strengths and interests, and we found out a lot of interesting information about our classmates. We also learned that in addition to doing experiments, special kinds of scientists can collect data and learn information about people. We collected data by checking boxes about activities under each of the 8 different smarts (read about Howard Gardner's work on different intelligences) and then graphing our results. Your child should have brought their survey and their graph home on Monday so you can talk about their strengths and interests with them.

From the data, we were about to CONCLUDE (a science word that means figuring out from the data!) about our class:

• A few of our friends found that they had similar scores in many different intelligences.
• Most of our friends found that they had one area where they were much stronger.
• Our class really likes nature because it had the highest number of people for a strengths and the fewest number of people under weaknesses.
• Here's how our class looks in terms of strengths:
• Word Smart - 0

• Logic Smart - 2

• Art Smart - 1

• Body Smart - 4

• Music Smart - 2

• People Smart - 1

• Self  Smart - 5

• Nature Smart - 9

These results helped us see that we all have special things that we like and are good at, but we also talked about the fact that some times we want to push ourselves and try things in our weaker areas. I'll use the information from our surveys to plan lessons that include lots of different activities to reach everybody's areas of strength AND push them to try new activities.