It has been another amazing week in Inquiry Based Learning. My epiphany this week was that the essential
features of inquiry hold true for any classroom and for any age student. Just as the science teacher, Arthur, was
explaining in the video, The Physics of Optics, “learning is when you take
something you know and something new and connect them so you know one piece of
information”(2000). I am making the connection that inquiry looks and feels
very much the same throughout students educational careers. Again, the process skills that I am teaching
will carry over for the rest of their lives.
I thought I had a pretty good understanding of this last week but it is
even more clear to me now. I have been
trying to focus in on my intentions with process skills in my classroom and
make sure I give them time to use those skills within our activities. It can be hard not just to give them the
answers especially when we are so time pressed in the classroom, but I can see
a huge difference when my students “stumble” upon the answer for
themselves.
The activity that we did last week with sorting
inspired me to have my students do the same with complete and incomplete
sentences. I had my students tell what
they know about this on their blog and then read their peers and make comments
as to how their ideas are the same and different. Then we did several activities with building
sentences in class to help the students discover the parts of the
sentence. In the beginning of the week
my students thought that a complete sentence had an uppercase letter at the
beginning and period at the end. It also
had to have a lot of words not just three or four.
On Thursday,
I gave students examples of 8 sentences on the board. I asked them to type complete at the top of
their blog and type the sentences underneath that were complete. Then I had them type incomplete and type
those sentences under that heading. The
students did this activity on their own and I walked around and asked them
questions and helped guide them. After
they typed the sentences I asked them to use parenthesis to write a sentence
after each incomplete sentence explaining why it was incomplete. At first the students would write the other
half of the sentence however they thought it should sound or some wrote it’s
not complete because it doesn’t make sense.
I continued to prompt them with questions like What part is
missing? What part is included? What are you wondering? They then revised their statements to
questions that reflected the missing part.
Where does Rylie go? What does
Dominick need? Who is going to the park? From their I had them revisit their complete
sentences. I asked them to write a
sentence telling me how they know those sentences are complete. Again they started out saying, I know they
are complete because they make sense. I
asked them to look at the incomplete sentences and think about what parts they
needed then look at the complete sentences and figure out what parts they
have. From there I started to get
answers like, I know they are complete because they tell the ‘who and what they
are doing’ or ‘how they are doing it’.
The sentence is a complete thought and it makes sense. It has an uppercase at the beginning and
punctuation at the end. At the end of the
lesson I had students come up and read their blogs. I asked them to explain their thinking and
reasoning for how they decided to sort the sentences.
The class did an excellent job of explaining and
justifying their new understanding of complete sentences. In addition, they built and strengthened
their technical process skills with computers such as how to set up a page to
show information being sorted or bulleted.
They learned how to go back into their writing and add more or edit what
they wrote. They practiced reflecting on
their thinking and using their prior knowledge to connect ideas. I am not an expert by any means, but I am
excited that some of these inquiry techniques and features are working in my
lessons to make learning more meaningful to my students.
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