My Journey as an Inquiry teacher: Where we are in Place and Time

Mirror mirror on the wall

I'll always get up after I fall.

Whether I run, walk or crawl.

I'll set my goals and achieve them all.

We began the new year and our second semester with some goal setting

We started the journey into our fourth Unit of Inquiry under the theme -"Where we are in place and time"

Tuning In

We began by introducing the students to a "Pencil Problem" that needs to be solved in the class.

We brainstormed all the problems we face with pencils in class.

The class was then divided into pairs or groups of three according to the "pencil problem" they'd like to solve.

Groups got busy in designing and building solution to solve the problem.

The students soon realized they had become inventors in their own little way trying to come up with a solution to a problem.

We followed this up with a game of Invention boggle
The students had to brainstorm inventive ways to use common objects to solve a problem or to do work.

We were now ready to come up with our own definition of Inventors.

Students brainstormed about Inventors...
Inventors are...
Inventors can....
Inventors have...

After understanding the difference between invention and discovery we set out to find out what were the different inventions we are surrounded around with.

We listed them down and set out to find out who had researched them and how long ago.

Post this we had a Tug - of - war in our class. We posed the students with the question -
Do you think inventions are a boon or a curse?

Time to unfold the central idea

We took the words and tried to arranges them in a sentence that made sense .........Guess what......we got the central idea right!!!

Finding out

By now we were very curious to know more about the different inventions and their inventors. To find out more we set out on an "Inventors Webquest". We brainstormed what are the things we would like to find out about and came up with the following list -

• the name of the invention

• a picture of the invention

• the name of the inventor

• the date or year it was invented

• one or two facts about how it was invented

• a description of what it does

• How does this invention help people?

• How do you think this invention changed the way people live?

• What kinds of things did this person need to know in order to create his invention?

• Would you consider this a successful invention? Why or why not?

Using our Research skills to gather data

We used the facts from our research to write an introduction of our biography of an inventor.

We will be adding more to the biography in the coming weeks.....

Sorting out

We began an Art project - "Bottle Biographies" with our Art teacher Ms. Delnaz.

We looked at what different materials we could use to make our bottles look like our inventor. We have used different materials and completed the face of our inventor. Stay tuned to see how the completed inventor looks.

Making a Timeline

We have been learning about timelines. We made one timeline to show when the different inventions were invented.

We are now researching on the timeline of the different inventions

Literacy

As this unit is all about knowing more about important people in History , we thought we will begin by getting to know ourselves better and recount our little lives till now.
We learnt how to write an autobiography