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.