Inquiry+Learning+Examples+Term+One

=An example of Inquiry Learning in a year 0/1 Class =

Our Inquiry Concept: “How can we enhance and preserve our beautiful World?” We started with a "Hook-in" Day. Children from the junior school came to the library and experienced what it might be like in our environment in the year 2020. Children wore face masks, worked in a hot environment, and had limited access to water. This stimulated lots of discussion about why our world might become like this and introduced the concept of sustainability.

As a team we developed our Rich Question:

We broke this question down into 2 subsidiary questions: 1. What is already beautiful at Whakarongo School. The children used thinking maps to identify what a 'beautiful' world looks like and what an 'unbeautiful' world looks like.

They then identified things around the school which they considered to be beautiful such as the people, the trees in our playground, the playground, the birds in the trees etc.

2. What needs to be improved to make Whakarongo School more "beautiful?" The children walked around the school and found rubbish which they had identified on their circle map as something which contributes towards making our school 'unbeautiful'. They took the rubbish back to their classrooms and categorised this into food, cardboard and plastic. Children quickly identified that one of the most common rubbish was rubbish which came from our own lunchboxes. They looked at their own lunchboxes and identified foods in there which were packaged and were contributing to the rubbish problem around our school.

Children were introduced to the concept of the 3 R's - reduce, recycle, reuse. During story-writing time, children came up with speech bubble ideas for how we could use the 3R's concept make Whakarongo School more beautiful.

Currently, children are at the stage of taking Action and finding out: "What can we do to make our school more beautiful?"

After looking through lunchboxes, children found that gladwrap was a large contributor to the rubbish in our school lunchboxes. The children also found out that gladwrap takes a very long time to break down in landfill and that wrapping our food in paper was a much more environmentally friendly practise. Children went home and told their parents that they needed to have their food wrapped in paper instead of gladwrap. The response was very encouraging and a recent look at children's lunchboxes has shown that most of them have their food wrapped in paper now.

The class then decided that a further action was required so that the rest of the school could look beautiful too! They came up with the concept of "Rubbish Busters" children who would go around the school at morning tea and lunchtimes and collect rubbish. The children began by discussing the types of things they could pick up which constituted rubbish They then designed their own "Rubbish Buckets" which could be used to collect the rubbish in. A rubbish bin with label was then produced and the children have been very motivated, picking up rubbish in their own time around our school. We hope this enthusiasm will continue and our school will continue to be a beautiful place! We hope our action has helped to enhance and preserve our beautiful world!

=An example of Inquiry Learning in a year 3/4 Class=

Our Inquiry Concept: "How can we enhance and preserve our beautiful world?" The middle school team also began with a "Hook-in" Day. Children were involved in 3 activities, each one dealing with a different concept - sustainability, interdependence, and biodiversity.

After the hook-in day, children spent time learning more about the 3 concepts and what they meant to us here at Whakarongo School. From these discussions, children came up with the Rich Question:

In order to answer this question, we broke it down into 5 subsidiary questions:

1. Where are the mice and rats coming from?
We decided to research the answer to this question by looking on google. We found a website which told us that mice and rats can live both inside and outside. when they live inside they like to live in walls, ceilings, cupboards, hot water cupboards etc. When they live outside they like to live in wood piles, tall grass, in unused cars and furniture and where there is rubbish. After this research we discussed how we knew that this information was correct? - couldn't anyone just put information onto the internet - how could we verify this information? Children were introduced to the concept of Triangular Validation and looked at library books and u-tube to validate the information they had found on google. From this information, we also explored the skills of identifying key words, note-taking and note-making.

2. Where are the mice and rats going to - which rooms are being effected?
We brainstormed ways that we could answer this question using a circle map. We then decided on 5 investigations that we could carry out to answer this question: Setting up a night-vision camera in classrooms Setting up a food trail - we took photos of this when we set it up and photos of it afterwards to see if any of the food had been eaten Setting mouse traps Looking for mouse poo in classroom cupboards and corners Making a questionnaire for teachers to answer to see if they have ever seen mice in their classes or signs that mice have been in their rooms.

We recorded our findings to this subsidiary question by following a scientific format

Currently our class is in the process of investigating the answer to subsidiary question 3: ======Where are the mice and rats getting into the classrooms?====== We will be having our care-taker, Mr Bleakley come to talk to us about this and we will go on a tour around the school and identify the problem places! After our tour, we discovered that mice and rats are getting into the classrooms in 3 main ways: under floors, in the roof spaces and through external pipes

We began investigating the answer to our fourth subsidiary question during term 2. The question was:"Why are they coming into the classrooms? What are they doing when they are inside?" As a class we hypothesised what we thought the answer was. Children thought that the mice and rats were coming into the classrooms to eat crumbs left on tables after brainfood time, to keep warm and sleep in the classroom art space and to eat food left in rubbish bins. We decided that we could set up investigations to test these hypothesis'. These were the investigations that we set up: 1. We put paper with some paint at one end across the desks. We thought at if mice were running along the desks looking for crumbs then they would walk in the paint and leave their footprints behind for us to see! 2. We set up the night-vision camera in the art space to see if mice were going there to sleep. 3. We put some peanut butter and a mouse trap in the rubbish bin. If the mice were going into the bins to look for food then they would get caught!

Unfortunately, the next day we didn't see any evidence of mice coming into our room. We know that they probably do though and if time permitted, we would have set up similar experiments in other classrooms to see what the results would be.

Next we looked at subsidiary question 5: "When are they coming into our classrooms?" We decided that we didn't really need to set up any investigations to test this because experience and our work so far had already provided us with the answer - at night-time!

The next stage of our inquiry journey was to have some ACTION! We knew that mice and rats would always be a problem at our school because of its rural position, so we thought the best way to deal with the problem was to try and minimise it. We decided that knowledge was our best weapon, so we made posters to have in classrooms to inform people of what they could do to eliminate the risk of mice coming to their classrooms.

We also thought we could let our caretaker, Mr Bleakley, know about which mouse traps are the most effective. To do this, we trialled 4 different mouse traps on their speed, cost, ease of use and human-ness. We found that The Better Mouse Trap and the Self-Set Mouse Trap were the most effective, so we wrote letters to Mr Bleakley to let him know about our findings.

Both of these actions, also involved us with sharing our findings, by telling the classrooms about the posters and by sharing our letters with Mr Bleakley.

Our inquiry journey has been a long one, but very rewarding and motivating. We would have liked to continue learning more about mice and rats, but our journey needed to stop somewhere!

=An example of Inquiry Learning in a year 5/6 Class=

Our inquiry concept: "How can we enhance and preserve our beautiful world?" The senior team began their Activate Stage of the Inquiry Learning process with a "hook-in" activity where the children all watched the movie "The Lorax" The children then participated in a whole group thinkng activity related to the thinkers hats.

Children then returned to their classrooms where rubbish was strewn all over the floors! Children classified this rubbish. The children were also involved in a rotation activity which taught them about water wastage, pollution of the air and mining of the land.

During the "Wonder" Stage of the Inquiry Learning Process, the senior children have been looking at the types of things that impact the different parts of our world to make it a less beautiful place. Children have been able to categories their ideas under Air, Water and Land As part of the Wonder Stage, children have also looked at the large impact rubbish has on our land, air and water environments. Children came up with ideas for ways they could reduce, reuse or recycle items from our daily rubbish.



This work around sustainability has lead to children coming up with the Rich Question: Children have broken this question down into smaller questions, identified keywords, possible sources of information and their hypothesis. Children are currently in the process of "Exploring" where they are locating their sources of information and using note-taking skills and triangular validation to answer their questions.

Working with a buddy, children continued to work on answering their subsidiary questions, based on their Rich Question, during term 2. Children continued to develop information literacy skills by using skills such as note-taking and validating information. Children located information using a variety of sources including the internet, email, books, interviews etc. Children also worked on developing their creativity skills, by using thinking tools such as Tony Ryan's Thinkers Keys to help develop their understanding of using recyclable materials to increase sustainability. For one of these creativity extenders, children created their own mail-boxes which were made entirely out of recycled materials.

In the later part of the inquiry process, the children reflected upon their big question, their subsidiary questions, how they researched and used triangular validation to answer this and what they had found out. They also worked with their buddies to come up with ideas for out they could get rid of the food scraps around the school.

The class looked at everyone's ideas about how they could get rid of the food scraps by doing a PMI (Positives, minuses and interestings) of each idea. As a class they decided that they best way to deal with food scraps around the school was to have a compost bin. The class was currently in the process of deciding how they would make their compost bin.