The biggest question, when I'm planning an IB PYP unit of inquiry is, at what level is my class in terms of experience and initiative when it comes to inquiry? In other words, which level of student inquiry will I be planning around - structured...

Malaguzzi and Musatti (1996), Pelo (2007) believe that self-portraiture is deeply connected to children’s identity perceptions … stories children tell in their portraits. A self-portrait is a…

Inquiry-based learning allows teachers to not only help students learn better, but also allow them to tap into their intrinsic motivation to outpreform peers

In the last couple weeks of school, we decided to do an inquiry about the sky. Our Driving Questions were, "What do we see in the daytime sky? What do we see in the nighttime sky?" The sun, moon and stars are in Ohio's science standards, but the students always end up being fascinated. The things they said they see were the pretty colors of the sky, clouds, rainbows, the sun, stars and moon. After we listed these, they started telling me things they noticed that happens in the sky, and then the wonders started. I love how much more complex their wonders get as the year goes on! "Is the earth still, or is it moving?" "Where does the sun go at night?" "Does the sun move around the earth like the moon does?" "If the sun is a star, why is it so much bigger than the other stars?" "How do the sun and moon move?" I started out with rainbows and sky colors. I found that most of them already knew the order of the colors and how rainbows are made. They loved creating rainbows though so I set out an area for them to create with art materials and prisms with flashlights. They were fascinated with the colors that the sky can be so we read "Sky Colors" and I set out opportunities for the kids to create their own "sky colors." They turned out beautiful!! We read many books about clouds, both informational and fictional. They learned that there are three main kinds of clouds. They showed their learning by creating a mural of the daytime sky. Here are some working on the different kinds of clouds. Next we learned about the sun. Here they are making the sun for our mural. We had noticed that you could also see the moon in the daytime sky but it was lighter. We made a moon out of vellum paper and added it to our mural along with facts that we had learned. Here is the finished Daytime Sky Mural! They were amazed that the sun was not moving around the earth, but that the earth was spinning instead. As we were exploring this concept further, they started wondering about the earth. "Is the earth in the sky, because, you know, it is in space and space is the sky?" How does the earth spin but we don't feel like we are moving?" "What is inside the earth?" We took a little break from what we saw in the sky to address these wonders. They created spin art of the earth and wrote one fact they thought was interesting that they had learned about the earth. We also made diagrams showing the inside of the earth. Next we started learning about the moon and the stars. I set out some invitations for them to research, explore, and show what they notice. I put out a picture of Van Gogh's Starry Night for inspiration at the easel. They started on our night sky mural. We started with the stars. Some created their own constellations! They made them all white, but then later added other colors as they found out that stars can be red, blue, yellow and brown. We added the phases of the moon: Here is a picture of our night sky! I wish that we had more time for this inquiry! They discovered galaxies and wanted to explore those further. This happens at the end of every year! They get so excited about exploring and inquiring as they are introduced to new and unfamiliar things because they are in that mindset! Everything they see, they want to learn more about! Seeing them like this at the end of the year, I would love to see them in an inquiry based classroom with this mindset in first grade! I think their excitement for learning and things they would want to explore would almost be hard to keep up with! If they did inquiry and interest based learning in first grade (or any grade!), the learning would be unstoppable and amazing!!

Among the benefits of inquiry-based learning, requiring the student to take an active role in the process may be the most significant.

'Social Emotional Learning' seems to be the new buzz word/term going around in the education world. What I love about this is that it is encouraging a child-first perspective in everything we teach. We have always used this lens to view education, so it is wonderful to see it spreading! "Social and emotional learning (SEL) is an integral part of education and human development. SEL is the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions." One way we support this learning in our classroom is using the Zones of Regulation. We have worked through the 4 different Zones of Regulation over the past month. Our students are now feeling experts and have demonstrated a good understanding of which feelings associate with which Zone. We used books and videos to work through the different feelings. Our first week we spent time reading books and watching videos about all feelings in general. We then focused on a specific zone for the week, reading a variety of books and then talking through what it looks like, sounds like and feels like in that zone to end our week. We used Story Bots videos for introducing many of the feelings. We put up all our signs in a way that helps students understand up and down regulation. When you are up-regulated, you need to down regulate to come back to the green zone. If you're down regulated, you need to up regulate back into the green zone. We then talked about ways we can up and down regulate to help ourselves get back to the green zone. Students loved using breath to help calm them, so we began recording the various breaths we can use. We are continuing to introduce new breaths they can use. Students shared their learning through drawing, writing and using loose parts. If you want to get these books for your classroom/personal library you can see my Amazon Storefront, I have a 'self-regulation/mindfulness' book list: https://www.amazon.ca/shop/wonderfullinquiry?listId=BTDC6FZWSO61 *Please note I get a small fee for most purchases made*

We spent lots of time identifying, describing, and sorting three-dimensional objects. Many of our families contributed to our 3D figures museum in the classroom. During the math inquiry our goal wa…

You might have heard the terms provocation and invitation with regards to inquiry learning. An invitation is something that encourages students to explore a concept. A provocation is something that provokes action and stimulates thinking.

Today is Earth Day, and we ditched our regular lessons to spend the day learning about pollution and how it affects our earth. We began with this oil spill activity that was really eye-opening, eve…

Pinay Homeschooler is a blog that shares homeschool and afterschool activity of kids from babies to elementary level.

My Body themed activities and centers (FREEBIES too)! Preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten kiddos will love these centers.

I work really hard to listen and observe the kids to see what they are interested in. I like to use their interests to guide the curriculum. I have found that when the curriculum stems from their interests, they naturally use the literacy, math, and 21st century skills needed as they explore and investigate. From the beginning of this year, the kids had been showing an interest in bird nests. Every time we went out on the playground, they were making nests. They also started gathering every stick we could find in order to build a more sturdy nest in our classroom since the one on the playground disappeared every day. Since we were still building a learning community in our room, I observed and put this on the back burner to revisit later, hoping the interest would hold. It did!! I put out an invitation to look closer and see what they noticed about the nests before we started building one. I also put out an invitation to create nests in our clay area. I predicted that maybe our nest inquiry would lead into an interest in birds so I also set out an invitation to learn more about birds to see what would happen. A few kids were interested and enjoyed it and learned from it, but not a majority of the kids. Birds would not be a large scale inquiry. I decided to stick with nests and see where it would take us. As we started a See/Think/Wonder Chart about nests, a picture of a bald eagle on its nest was noticed on our promethium board. All of a sudden, all of their questions and wonders were centered around these Bald Eagles. You could feel their excitement as we discussed and wondered about these amazing birds of prey! I asked if they wanted to explore these eagles further and they were very excited about the prospect! We watched many videos and live cams showing us eagles. The kids never tired of watching these! Based on their wonders, we created four expert teams. The Nest Experts (for those who were originally into the nest making), The Eagle Experts, The Eagle Family Experts, and The Eagle Prey Experts. I put out paints and clay in our Art Studio Area that would inspire them to use art to show what they notice about eagles. I loved how many tried to show that they noticed the curved beak of the eagle! The Eagle Experts learned that an eagle can get up to 43 inches high and have a 7 1/2 foot wing span! They measured out the width and height of the eagle and I drew it out for them. These birds can be massive! They were amazed at how big they were! They enjoyed seeing how much bigger the eagles wing spans were compared to them! They then looked closer at the feather colors and used ripped paper to create the long feathers of the wings and short feathers on its belly. They learned that they have curved beaks and sharp talons to hunt their prey with and learned the terms predator/prey and what they mean. The nest experts used the sticks we had been collecting and started out by throwing the sticks everywhere on a little branch I provided for them. They soon realized this wasn't going to work as all the sticks started falling off. I loved listening to them talk about it and problem solve. I heard terms and phrased such as "team" and "We won't give up!" They asked to look up a picture on my iPad. I had them look closely at an eagle nest to see what they noticed. They noticed the sticks went around the outside in a circle-like way and there was grass in the middle to make it soft. They then watched a video on the computer of an eagle making a nest. They noticed that she tried many places to put that one stick before she decided on where it would stay. When they went back to the nest, they were very careful on their placement of sticks! It was very hard and I still had to wire some pieces together to keep it from falling apart. This team learned how amazing it is that birds can make such strong nests with just two feet and a beak! They came to the conclusion that humans are not as good as birds when it comes to making a good sturdy nest, but we did our best and it turned out great, though fragile! They created a "Stop! Do not touch" sign. The Eagle Family Experts wanted to show what a typical eagle family looked like. They learned that the mom eagle is bigger than the dad eagle and that the mom have one to three eggs at a time. Both help keep the eggs warm and take care of/feed the babies. Two friends chose white clay to make an egg. One put a crack in it as though it were getting ready to hatch. After studying the colors on the birds, they used paper tubes to create the eagle family. They made sure the mother was bigger and that her and the father were brown with white heads and yellow beaks. The babies were fluffy gray with black beaks. They prey team used the computer and researched the type of animals that Eagles hunted and decided to use clay to show some examples. We created a web map in our room to organize our wonders and what we learned. Here are the finished displays to show what we had learned during our inquiry! The kids labeled and added the facts that we learned around our large eagle. It was amazing to see where the students took this! It was entirely based on their interests and changed with them! It took a little while to develop into a large scale inquiry. Not all of their interests go that far, and that is okay. This easily could have been a small scale nest inquiry done by a small group! I just had to listen to them, pay attention, and be willing to set out opportunities for them to explore further based on what I observed! So far, I have noticed two other very heavy interests shared by the class as a majority. Superheroes, and creating sounds and rhythm in different ways. I have noticed these interests since the beginning of the year and those interests continue to be strong, so while many other small scale inquiries may be going on, after the holidays, we may start one of these! I can't wait to see where the kids will take those interests! Here are some other things going on in our room! In math we are learning about making numbers up to ten in different ways to develop their number sense. They are also working hard to be able to write their numbers to 20. Some are even trying to get to 100! It took this friend 3 white boards to get to 80! Her goal is 100! A lot is going on literacy as kids are getting very excited about how much they have learned to read and write! In writing all of the kids are working on different writing skills from drawing a story to letter/sound correspondence to spaces and punctuation! In reading we are focusing on learning as many sight words as we can and noticing blends in words. In our science area, the kids have expressed a new interest in potions. I set up their first potion experiment for them. This station will continue through the holidays. In engineering, the blocks have been largely ignored in favor of K'nex! After reading the book "The Most Magnificent Thing," the kids have enjoyed creating their own magnificent things and showing the class what they do and how they work! Lots of creative and critical thinking are going on here! Stay tuned to see what will happen next in our classroom! You can never tell what it will be!

Cheap. Ridiculous. Embarrassing. Be honest with me, were those the first thoughts that ran through your head when you saw this idea? Well, I will totally embrace those terms then, even with their negative connotations (but let it be known I prefer the frugal, creative/industrious, and silly :-)) Playing with kites is a classic activity-…

I hope I’m not the only one who struggled with all the lingo when starting out as a teacher at an IB PYP school (International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme). Units of inquiry? Learne…

Hi friends! I'm sitting down today to share about the inquiry we just wrapped up! When we did our March inquiry brainstorm (I do these when there are no spontaneous wonders to expand on, I just ask the students to tell me everything they are wondering about about and I sort through them and pick a topic to investigate from these questions) there were quite a few friends wondering about things in the sky! So we decided to take those questions and do a sky inqury. We focused on clouds and thunder/lightning. *I totally misspelled lightning for the majority of the inquiry. So I apologize in advance! Live and learn! Now I definitely know how to spell it!"* On the first day we read "How Do Clouds Form?" by Lynn Peppas and we recorded on the whiteboard what we learned. Then we had one of the students who originally asked the question come and record what we learned to put on our inquiry board. He recorded, "Clouds float in the sky because they are made up of tiny water droplets or ice crystals. Each droplet is so small and light that it floats in the air." You can see his writing and picture on the inquiry board below (top middle): Next we read the book "It Looked Like Spilt Milk". Then we had two centres available to go with the book. First I put out this retell centre. I got the templates for the felt pieces from Kizclub.com. The students used the book to try to retell the story in the correct sequence. We also had this centre where students made their own spilled milk art using cotton balls. Then they wrote their own spilled milk sentences to describe what they made! They LOVED this activity! Here are the students working on their spilt milk pictures and writing... And here are some of the completed pieces: "Sometimes it looked like a tornado, but it wasn't a tornado. It was just a cloud in the sky." "Sometimes it looked like a fidget spinner. But it wasn't a fidget spinner. It was just a cloud in the sky." "Sometimes it looked like a sight word. But it wasn't a sight word. It was just a cloud in the sky." If you would like to download the writing template for this craft, you can download it by clicking here or on the image below: We also had this Raindrop CVC Search in our sensory bin to tie in with our cloud inquiry! The students were invited to read a CVC word and then find the corresponding picture. Then they were asked to record the word on the clipboard. You can find this activity in my "Kindergarten Spring Activities" pack. You can click here or on the image below if you are interested in taking a closer look! Next we read the book "Little Cloud" by Eric Carle and made our own "Little Cloud" art! I mixed shaving cream and white glue (half and half) to create the puffy "cloud" paint for the students to use! "Little cloud changed into a hyena" "Little cloud changed into a tree." If you would like to do this activity with your kids too, you can download the writing template by clicking here or on the image below: I also made this sensory bin for the kids to explore! It has blue water beads, water, airplanes and soap clouds in them! The soap clouds are ivory bar soap microwaved for 2 minutes. They were so cool and the kids loved playing with the different textures and making stories with the materials provided here! On the fourth day we investigated the question "How are clouds made?" We read pages 6-9 out of the book "How Do Clouds Form?" by Lynn Peppas and we filled in a cloze passage on chart paper. You can see the cloze passage we filled out on the bulletin board at the top of this post! On the fifth day we investigated the question "How are clouds made?" again but this time I performed a little experiment for them! I followed the "How To Make A Cloud In A Jar" experiment steps from No Time for Flashcards. First I boiled some water in a kettle while they were at recess. Then when we started the experiment, I poured some hot water into the glass jar. I told them the hot water represents how the sun heats up the water and the water will start to evaporate. Then I sprayed some hairspray into the jar. We talked about how the hairspray particles represent the dust in the air that the water vapour will cling on to in the sky. Then we closed the lid and put some ice on the lid. We reviewed how the air is colder higher in the sky and that is why the water vapour changes back into water droplets. We watched as the water vapour changed back into water droplets as it evaporated towards the top of the jar and cling to the hairspray, creating a cloud in the jar! It was really cool! Finally we opened the jar and watched the cloud float out. I wish I could show you the reaction of the kids. They were all clapping and so excited. They requested to do it again and we ended up doing it three times! I had one of the students take pictures of the process and the next day we worked on a recount of the steps (procedural writing) and I had students come and write each step on a sheet with the pictures. You can see their finished work on the bulletin board at the bottom of this post! Next we moved on to some questions about thunder and lightening. We investigated the question, "Why does it thunder?" by reading the book "Thunder and Lightning" by Alice K. Flanagan. This was a really great book that explained thunder and lightning in a Kindergarten friendly way! After the lesson, we recorded what we learned and I had the student who originally posed this question come and record our new learning. He wrote "Lightning gives off a lot of heat. The heat causes a loud sound called thunder." The next day I had this 2 part art activity out for the kids to try! On the first day I had the students paint the background by mixing black and white paint to create the stormy sky. Here they are working on their backgrounds: On the second day they cut out their cloud(s), lightening bolt(s) and raindrop(s) from construction paper and glued it on to their backgrounds. I provided some tracers but they were free to cut their shapes on their own as well. When they were done I had them either trace the sentence, copy the sentence or write their own thunder/lightening fact. If you would like to try this art/craft activity with your kids too, you can click here or on the image below to download the writing template: The next day we watched "What Causes Thunder and Lightening?" by Scishow Kids. We ended up watching it twice and filling in the corresponding cloze chart for two days since she talks fast and there is a lot of information to remember from the video! You can see the cloze chart we filled out on the bulletin board below! Here is our final bulletin board for our sky inquiry! This one was a tricky topic! The science behind clouds and lightening/thunder was tricky to explain in a Kindergarten friendly way (while still being accurate) but they are an advanced group and they seem to have gotten most of the concepts we talked about! Next we are taking a short break from student-directed inquiry and will be working on Earth Day lessons during our usual inquiry input time! I'll be back with another inquiry post (I'm hoping to fit in at least one more before I go on mat leave!) when we get back to it! - Yukari

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Discover how to use weather gnomes to teach Year 1 students about weather patterns and seasonal changes in line with the ACARA Science Curriculum.

Hi friends! I'm back with another weekly round-up. I hope you can grab some ideas to use in your classroom! 1. CAN YOU MAKE A LETTER TREE? My kiddos absolutely loved this provocation! I introduced the challenge and the students worked on making the tree that held the most letters! It imbeds counting, engineering and critical thinking. I got this idea from Preschool STEAM. I loved that the students showed perseverance as they kept tweaking their tree to create the strongest tree! 2. CAN YOU COUNT THE BEARS? Here is a simple provocation I set out to practice counting manipulatives. We read the book "Bear Counts" last week and we set out some bear counters with ten-frames and number cards. Students were free to create stories with the bears as well in addition to counting them! 3. 2D SHAPE CENTRES We started working on 2D shapes in math this week! First we worked on identifying shapes. At this centre students were invited to trace the shape and shape word with a dry erase marker. I printed my dry-erase book 2 to a page to create these mini dry erase cards. They are in my 2D shape unit! We also set out these shape mats! We used them with both flat marbles and play dough! The kids practiced creating shapes and making connections to where they see shapes in their lives! You can also find the shape mats in my 2D shape unit here. 4. ETCH-A-SKETCH I found these mini Etch-a-Sketch's at Dollar Tree at the end of August and pulled them out this week as a different way to practice letter formation and mark making! I set the Etch-a-Sketch boards out with my lowercase letter formation cards to encourage the kids to practice printing lowercase letters. You can find these cards in my TPT store here. 5. SIGHT WORD BOOKLETS I mentioned these last week and I'm planning to put these out weekly as extra practice for our weekly sight word! My kids are doing a great job printing the sight word and reading the simple sentences! You can find this "I" booklet in this product and in this bundle. 6. TYPING LETTERS I don't know what it is about them but every year the kids flock to this keyboard centre! I found these keyboards at Dollarama years ago. I set them out with my tactile letter cards (I made them by sticking felt stickers onto unfinished wood rectangles; they can both be found at Michaels). The kids practiced picking a card, finding it on the keyboard and typing it. 7. RHYMING MATS We also worked on identifying rhyming words this week! We practiced matching rhyming pairs with these rhyming mats whole group and then left them out as a centre for the kids to practice with independently. I put magnets on the back and put the mats on cookie sheets so that the card stuck to the cookie sheet and gave it a more tactile feel. The kids did so well with these! I put these mats in my store so if you want to grab them you can click here or on the image below: That's it for this week! I have my bachelorette party tomorrow and my wedding next weekend so I might be a little bit MIA this coming week. If you email, DM or PM me I might be a little slower at responding. Please be patient with me and I'm hoping to get back to my regular schedule by the 2nd week of October! Have a great weekend! - Yukari

Are you searching for art projects for your fourth grader that will stretch his imagination? As a fourth-grade teacher or parent, there are so many fun, inexpensive, and engaging art projects that fourth-graders will have a blast completing. A parent or teacher can oversee and enjoy these art projects that are sure to keep your fourth grader entertained!