A Wonderful Week
This week we continued with large and small group inquiry sessions. The small groups worked well when inquiring on individual wonders. I found it kept the excitement and motivation higher for students with increasing the active participation. I also worked towards completing my UbD inquiry unit for the final summary.
My students participated in the two lessons to help scaffold their understanding of how to ask a good question. The first lesson using senses, the students were required to describe items in an attempt to deduce their identity. The act of guessing encouraged them to use more descriptive and comparative wording in order to refine their ideas of what it could be. This was an interesting process. The students instantly wanted to guess what the item could be. I began as whole class modelling the process of how to ask questions to deduce, and how to make a question more impactful. For example, is it long became, is it as long as a crayon or a paper clip? I modelled my thinking out-loud, explaining how I was creating an image in my mind of what I was hearing with things I already knew. Once I heard the students forming better questions, I broke them into small groups to play the game. I was really impressed with how they caught on to figure out what was in the bag. It was also nice to see how much fun they had learning new skills. The second inquiry lesson was with popcorn. We began with a MindUP session to help us feel more focused and mindful. In that state, I modelled how to mindfully experience popcorn using my 5 senses. What does it smell/look/taste/sound/feel like? What words can we use other than popcorn? The process of using a variety of adjectives to describe popcorn was a challenge at first. After modeling, I broke the students into pairs. They took turns eating a piece and describing it to their partner. I was really surprised by some of their answers. Lastly, I have been spending time every day to slowly build my PLN adding new people to follow on Twitter and looking for interesting google communities to join. Below is a slideshow that I created with PhotoPeach which I found on CogDogRoo. I found PhotoPeach simple, intuitive and fun to use. I have shown photos to provide a porthole into what inquiry looked like in our class this week.
Inquiry the K-1 Way on PhotoPeach
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AuthorK-7 Coordinator in SD68. Archives
January 2017
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