My Journey as an Inquiry teacher: 3 Short weeks

Three short eventful weeks

The second week brought with it a journey into the water world. We began our inquiry to learn about the precious resource - WATER

Tuning In

Day 1: We started our tuning in by using a pictorial provocation. Each table had a different picture and question to trigger the thinking of the students.

Day 2: Each group was given a newspaper article related to the monsoon season.

We read the newspaper and discussed - *What is the newspaper reporter trying to tell us?

* How far do you think this article is true?

* Do you agree with what the person is trying to say - Why or why not?

* Write down one fact that you gathered from the article?

Provocation

To tune in to the theme of our unit - 'Sharing the Planet' and central idea - 'Water is one of the main natural resources and we must preserve it ', we took the water bottles of students away for the day. They were provided limited amount of water in a water dispenser. The water in the dispenser was the only water they had access to for the day.

Some of their reactions and thoughts.......

Mystery Text Quotes

Technology is most certainly the future, so it would be best to introduce it to elementary children and get the familiar with programs and skills they will need in their near future. Using technology in the classroom also sparks interests withing the students, it's different than the teacher writing everything on the white board.

Day 3: We looked at the video - Nature talking. Post the video we discusses what message was nature trying to give us. We then unfolded our central idea and the key concepts of our unit.

Post the discussion we began wondering what were the things that we wanted to learn more about under this unit.

Finding out

To find out more about how the water is distributed on Earth we first found out what are the different forms of water on Earth.

Sharing our ideas using the Think link share strategy.

We were given QR codes and we went on different sites to find out the different forms of water.

Sorting Out

To assess the prior knowledge of capacity we began by estimating the amount of water the different containers can hold.

We measured to see if our estimations were accurate.

We took up measuring water to understand the connection between liter and milliliter.

We took on the task of exploring how was the fresh water distributed on the Earth.

We stated - If all the water on the Earth was equal to one liter, how much of fresh water is available to humans for use?

We realized that of all the water present on the Earth, there is only 3% of fresh water that can be really used by humans.

Do we really have all of the 3% of fresh water to use??????

We used our understanding of milliliter and liter to measure and experiment the different amounts of each form of water found on the Earth.

Our findings

We were posed with another essential question - How does this 3% of fresh water get distributed over the Earth.

Before we dwelled further into this we did some experiments to understand the terms -
Evaporation

Condensation

Precipitation

Water cycle Stimulation game
The students became water molecules and rotated between different station depending on the instruction son each station. This game made us realize that the same water molecule moves from one state to another.

Post this we used the picture priority strategy to see what we had understood through the water cycle stimulation game.

Take a peek at how we figured out the water cycle -

Once we were familiar with these terms we were given a project to work on to understand the water cycle i.e. - How does water move ?

Take a peek at our task here.

Working hard to get the projects complete

Using QR codes to gain access to sites

Stay tuned for our presentations next week........

Literacy

In language, we are learning to write reviews.

Math

We our working our way around the concept of Place value.

To activate our previous understanding of place value we played the silent game.

We are working with different manipulative and strategies to understand the connection of the value and place of the digit.

B.U.I.L.D. time

We created our accounts on Khan Academy. We will be using this to learn and make our understanding of math concepts stronger.

This year we had a PYP elections to select a candidate to represent the PYP in the student council.
We even got our fingers inked to ensure there was fair voting!!!

Once we had our PYP representatives elected it was now time to vote for the EIS student council for 2017-18.

Independence Day celebration

We played a short quiz on Independence day to refresh ourselves about India.

Our Independence day celebration began with Ms.Chantele our youngest staff member hoisting the flag.

Some of our friends gave inspiring speeches in Hindi.

Along with us some of our other friends from different grades too sang some patriotic songs to entice the spirit of freedom. a peek into into our performance -

Our celebration ended with the felicitation of the Student council members.

Our First class assembly

We put up our first assembly of Grade 3.

We began with going to all the PYP classrooms and read them stories based on different learner profile. Post the story we brainstormed the learner profile the story was about.