Chapter 8: Metacognition

Consider a lesson plan you might use. Which metacognitive skills/abilities are involved as students gain facility/knowledge in this domain? Think of an activity or lesson component that explicitly teaches one or more metacognitive and one or more problem solving skills. 
Currently I am working on a social studies lesson plan for a Kindergarten class. I am planning to teach a lesson on wants and needs. I was thinking about this lesson throughout the discussion of chapter 8 and which skills the children might use while learning. The first thing I thought about was the type of learning strategy the children might use. Since it is Kindergarten, I know they will not take notes, that is definite. However, depending on each of their prior experiences, they may use some sort of covert strategies to gain an understanding of the lesson. Possibly, just through their short experiences at school, they may be able to recognize important words (bold faced, larger) that will trigger something in their brain to think"Oh, I need to remember this." Next, I thought about how the children would think critically about this subject. After reading the description of argument analysis, I thought this would be the best way the children could thing about needs and wants. It takes a certain level of cognitive processing (for this age) to differentiate between a need and a want, because everything to them is a need! Through an activity that asks the children to sort between items into a need category and a want category, they will have to justify (argue) why they chose to place the item in the category they did. As far as problem solving is concerned, I think that any activity the children might to do practice their knowledge of wants and needs will involve well-defined problems. With this type of subject, there should not be any uncertainties about the solutions. However, like I stated before, many young children will think of all items of important need. Through brainstorming and collaborative discussion, we could generate ideas about why someone or multiple people find a certain item to be a "need" (ex: (drastic example) if a child wanted to justify why a teddy bear- maybe personally their favorite- is important and to them is essentially a need). As a class, we could brainstorm why this is a need and discuss our justification for why we feel this way. With this extension of the activity, I would not want to discourage children by sharing their ideas of needs by discrediting their justifications.