Welcome back to my blog series about Inquiry Based Learning. Last week I wrote about our
activities which helped the kids to come up with an inquiry question.
activities which helped the kids to come up with an inquiry question.
This week we’re going to focus on research. Now as there were many different inquiry
questions in the class, I wanted to give each child the chance to do their own research. I started out with a few group lessons of reading a few books online with the class using the projector and the app EPIC. It’s a great app, if you don’t already have it. The books on it
are great and it’s free.
questions in the class, I wanted to give each child the chance to do their own research. I started out with a few group lessons of reading a few books online with the class using the projector and the app EPIC. It’s a great app, if you don’t already have it. The books on it
are great and it’s free.
Then we took a few periods to let the kids do their own individual research. We used iPads
and the website kiddle.co which is a kids version of google. The students wrote down some notes. After a week, I realized that kids were not actually taking very good notes. They
were copying down a lot of words from websites, but they didn’t understand what they meant, or even if it was related to their inquiry question. So I realized I needed another strategy.
and the website kiddle.co which is a kids version of google. The students wrote down some notes. After a week, I realized that kids were not actually taking very good notes. They
were copying down a lot of words from websites, but they didn’t understand what they meant, or even if it was related to their inquiry question. So I realized I needed another strategy.
I decided to ask the parents to help. Now I work in a community where many parents
work at 2 jobs or more. They are very busy and don’t have a lot of time to spend with their kids. Most of the parents are also immigrants and don’t always understand the school’s expectations. So I knew that only a few kids might get this done with their parents, but I decided to give it a try anyway.
work at 2 jobs or more. They are very busy and don’t have a lot of time to spend with their kids. Most of the parents are also immigrants and don’t always understand the school’s expectations. So I knew that only a few kids might get this done with their parents, but I decided to give it a try anyway.
Well, I was pleasantly surprised. I send the letter above home on a Friday. 2/3 of my class returned the notes the next Monday. And by Wednesday all the kids had returned some sort of research. I could tell which kids had continued to just write down words from the internet and which kids had actually had help from their parents, but at least they all returned another page of notes and most of them had facts related to their inquiry question.
If you are interested in doing project based learning, I have many products in my TPT store specifically designed for this. Click below to find out more.
CLICK HERE for project based learning and inquiry based learning resources.
Click on the photos below to go to the individual products.
Thanks for stopping by again today!
CLICK HERE for the next post in this series.
