OuiSi · Critical thinking

Connection networks

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Grades 3–5 Teaching 45 min Plus 3 to set out, 3 to clear Class any size Set any Prep sticky notes per group

set out 3′ Connect, then label 12′ What is this web about 10′ Pull one out 12′ Webs inside webs 8′ Close 3′ clear 3′

Goal: Children build a web rather than a line, write down every link they make, then find out which cards the whole thing depends on by pulling them out.
Materials: One OuiSi Photo-Card set. About ten cards per group of four, sticky notes, and markers.

Grade 3: Steps 1, 2 and close. Label every link, then name the web — about 25 min.
Grade 4: Add step 3, pulling a card from the middle — about 37 min.
Grade 5: Two links per card before naming, and all five steps — the full 45 min.

1 · Connect, then label

12 min

Groups of four, about ten cards, spread out with room to move them.

Connect any two cards. Now write on a sticky note what the link is, and put the note between them.

Writing the label is the whole difference between this and every other connecting activity. An unnamed link cannot be argued with, and a named one can.

Keep going. Every link gets a note.

Any card can have more than one link. Try to give at least one card three.

2 · What is this web about

10 min

Groups step back and look at their labels, not their cards.

Read your sticky notes. What do they have in common?

Give your whole web a name.

Water, growing things, broken things, things that repeat. Children name these accurately and at a level of abstraction that usually surprises teachers.

Then the question that does the real work.

How do you know? Point at the evidence on the table.

3 · Pull one out

12 min

Take one card out of the middle of your web. What happens to the links that went through it?

Some webs fall apart, some barely notice. That difference is the lesson — a web that runs through one card is fragile, a web with many routes is not — and children see it on the table rather than hearing it said. The word for a card that everything runs through is a hub, and it is worth giving them once they have found one.

Now put a card back in a different place. Does the web hold?

4 · Webs inside webs

8 min

Each group says their web's name only — not the cards.

Write the names on the board as they come.

Look at the board. Do any of these belong inside another one?

Sometimes this lands in a minute and sometimes it does not land at all, and both are fine. If nobody sees it, take two names yourself and ask the room whether one could sit inside the other.

5 · Close

3 min

Which card was hardest to take out of your web? What does that tell you about it?

Watch for

Skipping the labels. Groups will connect faster than they write. Without the sticky notes, step two has nothing to work from and the lesson becomes an ordinary sorting activity.
Lines instead of webs. Give each group more table space than they think they need, and move one card yourself so it touches three others.
Rushing step three. Pulling a card out feels destructive and children resist it. Do it to your own demonstration web first.
Sorting by object — all the animals together. Redirect: what connects them, not what they are.

Adapt

Writing support — labels can be drawn or dictated to a partner. The naming matters, not the spelling.
Children who think faster than they write — let them build and point first, then label. Separate the thinking from the writing.
Want it harder — ask for a web where removing any single card leaves it intact, then ask what that cost them.
Tie it to a unit — run it at the end of a science or social studies topic and the names come from the unit.

Curriculum links. Representing relationships as a network · Justifying a claim from evidence on the table · Reasoning about dependency and redundancy · Nested categories.
Standard codes vary by state and district — these are the skills exercised, for you to map to your own.

A note on the word system. What children build here is a network — things with named links between them. That is real and worth teaching on its own. A network becomes a system when its parts act on each other, so that changing one changes another. Photographs of unrelated things will rarely do that honestly, so this guide does not claim it. If you want the systems version, run it at the end of a unit where the content supplies the causal links and the cards only stand for them.
Screen-free. No codes and no devices. Works with any OuiSi Photo-Card set.
Extension. Photograph each web before step three, so groups can compare before and after.