Term 3 Inquiry Sharing

Inquiry Review September 1 Staff shared what has worked well for their Term 3 inquiries and in some cases why things haven’t worked well. Also, we talked about the why as well as of the what. The key thing from these reflections is to feed forward evaluations and reflections into their class’s next inquiry. Some notes: • Lots of good questions, all children participating with improvement in quality questions • Noted that teachers valued children by recording their names with the questions • Children self and peer monitoring • Some answers from children didn’t meet teacher’s expectations in terms of depth/delivery • Evidence of student voice even at a junior level of the direction for the unit e.g. choice of animal to inquire about • Depending on the topic/questions, children needed lots of input and motivation from the teacher in terms of building their knowledge base • Having a good SPARK is key to a successful inquiry • Use of student developed wikis has been a good motivator/Voice tool and is also a good way to keep track of progress as the student’s wiki develops over time • Strong development of children’s understandings of keywords/phrases when creating questions has been noted by some teachers. • Good evidence of letting children’s wonderings generate the interest in their inquiry • Links made between keywords from questions to skilful use of a search engine like Google or Ask.com • Senior classes used to work alongside juniors and support with questions and rephrasing both the questions as well as putting findings into children’s own words • Need to find some websites that are written in child speak as a resource bank. Videos/DVDs can be useful sources of information as children are generally better at viewing and listening than they are at reading • Inquiry has been a good way to develop children’s social skills in a meaningful context and to improve participation/co-operation within a group as well as relating to others (Key Competencies). • Last term’s inquiry and/or recent class events has in some cases fed forward into a meaningful inquiry for Term 3, which has been good as it represents a response to children’s interests/needs • Teachers have noted that their class’s inquiries have been an enjoyable learning experience for them as well as their children and that children have taken the inquiry a way that the teacher hadn’t thought of or wanted but this has all turned out well • Many teachers have focused on questioning as the key aspect in this term’s inquiry • Good use of Trevor Bond’s questioning rubric in some classes • Use of quality literature in conjunction with DVD has been a strong motivating factor (Spiderwick Chronicles) in one class (SPARK backed up by high teacher enthusiasm) • A field trip can be used as a SPARK but can also be used as a fun way to bring a unit to an end (e.g. trip to Owlcatraz). • Kidspiration has been a useful means of organising and displaying ideas as a class • The emphasis on questioning, discussion etc in an inquiry has led to improved oral language and vocabulary skills • Use of art to show learning/knowledge rather than writing has been a positive in one class as it has given children an accessible and motivating means of Voice • Inquiries have been a good means of building up content knowledge in response to student interest (e.g. science – vertebrates, exoskeleton etc) • Music unit on ukuleles has become a secondary inquiry in one class by use of questionings and wonderings as well as developing children’s musical skills • Encouraging and developing questioning skills is a significant challenge for new entrants • We can’t assume what is in children’s heads, we need to think! Perhaps we need to try and think as a child thinks, also perhaps use make believe as an approach to develop curiosity and creativity or some hands on. • We need to feed information in (You Tube, fiction, non fiction, DVD, hands on experiences) to children when they are lacking in knowledge/interest. • http://www.pppst.com/index.html • There is a danger in losing coherence by going too broad or diverse with a topic – perhaps keep a central question and have groups work around it but contributing to the main question

Inquiry - Sharing

We have just had a fantastic sharing session re our current Inquiry. The key focus has been:

• Share something that worked well
• Why do you think this was the case?
• Application for future Inquiries

A strong theme coming through was the teachers reflecting on student voice in the Inquiry -the stronger the student voice often the greater the success with the Inquiry.

Teachers were able to identify the where to next time....Inquiry is alive and well at Levin North!

Another crack at it

Again we tried to enable student interest while following the school's model. This was achieved , in some degree, by allowing the student ideas to form and develop.

The students have definitely improved their questioning and are more able to manipulate information to reflect the needs of the questions.

Room 15 Scotland

Well, we've had a full on term. The students came up with all sorts of places and cultures, voted and chose Scotland! We talked about how culture is expressed and came up with Music, Legends & Folktales, Dress, Dance and Food & Drink. That created groups for inquiry (groups of 5-6). We've talked a lot more explicitly about the STRIVE model so that children become more familiar and comfortable with using it. To support that, I have done short mini inquiries, based on children's questions about the flags, haggis, bagpipes, Loch Ness monster etc - these have been quite popular. Students have been better in terms of questioning and we have also talked about the 7 levels of questioning - we need a common graphic/format for this to display in classrooms so that the language of questioning gets embedded in our culture of inquiry. I've got at least one student ready and keen to try an independent inquiry in Term 3 so that will be interesting and challenging, but exciting. In Term 3, it's our last term of the 1 year STRIVE trial model so I hope that it will be a term for thinking about how the model can be improved - evaluating it's strengths and weaknesses and talking about where to next as a school in terms of inquiry. I'm also excited of course to see where things go in terms of children's interests for Term 3.

Room 13

Knowledge of other cultures and countries is minimal, so it was good to have the class studying another country.

The children responded to doing team work to answer their inquiry questions, with the use of graphic organisers to refine and present information.  Focus on music and art for learning about Jamaica.  Further study developed of pirates who were based in Jamaica which roused interest.  Made use of a few Youtube clips as a resource for information to answer questions, as well as several Powerpoint presentations that were available and National Geographic for Kids website for animal and bird studies.   Web site for Jamaican patois language was good. Keen to share their knowledge with other classes in the Syndicate.  Difficult to obtain video resources about the Caribbean, but have just located one newly released BBC DVD called "Wild Caribbean" which is on order, and part of this will be viewed as a reinforcement of the unit objectives and the concepts  studied when it does arrive. 

Room 1 Japan inquiry

Much better this term, knowing more about the process.  More to do here and to make it more child based, although some of the items we chose are leading us to different places. e.g. investigating Mt Fuji means the children now want to find out about volcanos, how the earth was formed, etc.  This will lead nicely to topics for next term.  Didn't do many of the things I had thought about initially especially the music and dance.

At this level the process and the terminology seems to go over their heads but I guess the more we practice it the more the process will make sense!!!

Japan and Samoa Room 7

Room7 (Yr 1/2) of LNS have been diving into two countries. We will be presenting our findings on Japan over a wide range of subjects, from origami to a paint-shaded Mt Fuji at Sunset to kanji calligraphy to sumo to traditional Japanese housing. The essential go-to site that gave us everything we needed to know was http://web-japan.org/kidsweb/, and it's full of great interactive games for junior-level kids. Samoa is the smaller unit through which we've been paying more attention to the STRIVE model. Our suggestion for review, esp for the junior area, is STRIPE (incl. Present instead of Voice). Already the children have shown a high degree of spark, task and research, with artifacts ranging from native rubber balls to light weaponry (!) to kava bowls (!!) pouring in. We will be spoiled for things to present on our last week!

Room 12 Term2 Inquiry: China

Of course, we all had a lot of fun and learnt heaps about China. We focused on Chinese legends and special celebrations. We also became fascinated with pandas. A lot of useful websites were discovered, with some good video clips. We certainly got better at asking and answering questions! Did you know that red is a favourite colour? Could you explain the pattern on the Chinese flag? Do you know who Nian is - or PanGu - or the Jade Emperor? Could you write the word 'dragon' using chinese characters? Some of this information you will find in our Room 12 Blogspot (http://room12lns.blogspot.com) Next term's topic? Visit our site next term and find out.

Room 8 T2 Inquiry

  

*We have had emphasis on questioning and the children are enthusiastic.

*We have started on comparisons in 2 areas, food and schools, as these are areas the children know about from experience, which helps with their investigation into another country's way of doing these things.

*We have cooked NZ food and Indian food, and this was a real highlight. We have some more cooking to do.

*The children are using the library books, reading pictures and text for information after setting their own questions through class discussion. We hope to have something to share in the 'celebration'.

Room 18 Inquiry Term 2

Room 18 has been focussing in on Spain.  They really enjoyed the opportunity to learn some Spanish (colours, numbers, greetings) and this motivated them to find out more.  The different festivals were of high interest to them as they are different to our own.  They were also interested to learn about the flag and how widely spoken Spanish is.  Next step, if time, is some art based around Picasso's work.  

Talking about the STRIVE model was helpful, children quickly realised which stage we were up to and what that meant they needed to be doing.