What Do You Wonder About?

What Are Your Wonderings? The first graders at Memorial School have a lot of them! They're wondering about stars, hurricanes, spring, caves. You name it. They're wondering about it. I bet you are wondering why we're doing some much wondering?! Well Memorial's Teacher-Librarian Randie Groden (@randiegroden) is revamping the Big 6 research project to the Stripling Model of Inquiry- with the focus on learning how to ask good questions ..... or wonders.

It works like this. Students are introduced to making an inquiry and researching their inquiry using the new Emergent Reader Research (Science) Database called Pebble Go. Next they brainstormed a list of their wondering topics based on the Science categories and began their research documenting the facts and information they learned from the videos, images and text onto a (paper) graphic organizer.

Click on image to enlarge.

We posted our wonderings both on the LMC's bulletin board with 

sticky notes and our virtual bulletin board (padlet.com) too!

Click on image to enlarge.

After their research was completed, students drew a picture and

 wrote several sentences about their wonder.

Of course, we couldn't keep this all to ourselves!

It was important for us to create something 

to post on the blog and share our new learning.

Good thing we have iPads & the Chatterkids app to 

take a snapshot of our drawings and audio record

the facts we learned. That's what we did!

This is when students were teamed up with a partner to create 'talking' pictures!

Since it was this classroom's first time experiencing using the iPads,

working in partners helped students remember and/or

 figure out the directions together and sometimes 

you just need an extra pair of hands for picture-taking

and recording!

And now what you all have been wondering about... 
what does this Inquiry process really look like?

Now that this process has been modeled, teachers

can incorporate it into their classroom on a more consistent 

basis. Otherwise, in the past years with the Big 6th project, we found

that it was a once a year "big showcase" project that seemed

to be more teacher-centered than student. Hoping to see 

a transformation with the new Stripling Inquiry based approach and
the integration of technology to becoming more student-driven, collaborative, 
and connect students to a variety of resources.
This is just the beginning!

Besides.. wondering is neverending...

What's your next wonder?

FYI: Check out Wonderopolis.org as another place to Wonder