Could it be? Could it really be?
Ahhhh yes it is Friday. My long lost friend. My BFF.
I haven’t linked up for Five For Friday in MONTHS! I needed to take a break from adding to my shopping cart on TPT so I thought I would share 5 random things from my week. Thank you Doodlebugs for this awesome weekly linky.
I was asked to take part in a totally inspiring collaborative inquiry project…about inquiry learning/teaching.
We worked on a strategy that works really well in the classroom! It’s called an inquiry wall:
Essentially you just place a question, or a word/topic in the middle of the wall and students record related questions or ideas on sticky notes. Once the first sticky note is up, the teacher can then ask for similar ideas so they can be placed together. Then if someone has another idea that is different than the first one they place it somewhere else on the wall and other ideas related to the new one can be placed in the new spot. You keep going with this until all the stickies are up. You can even draw lines to connect ideas if you are doing this on a white board.
We started working on some inferring this week and used this activity from Comprehension Connections.
We’ve also been working on writing Excellent Endings! We used my interactive notebook activity for extra practice. The kids had a blast.We began by doing some shared writing. We created a story called Planet Taco. We wrote the story but left off the ending and the students used the interactive notebook to create 5 alternate endings. We got some really cute endings!
You can find that interactive notebook activity in my store or by clicking here or the image above.
My students have been working on an inquiry about countries around the world. So, long story short…my students are now pen pals with some students in Uganda.
They conducted a hot chocolate and cookie sale to raise money for the school in Uganda and they managed to raise $900 (with some help from some fellow awesome TPT sellers as well)!
And on a personal note, I went to see The Full Monty musical! It was HILARIOUS!!! I had no idea what it was about, my friend had free tickets and asked me to go along. Let’s just say there were naked bums!
On that note, I’m off to stock up my TPT cart since there is only about 3 hours left of the 28% off sale!
Toodles
Heidi
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Love your writing interactive notebooks. Off to add it to my cart!!!
Jamie
Thanks Jamie! I hope your kids enjoy it! Mine loved writing the endings the most!
Really, really like that inference poster! I had to pin it so I can use it for future reference. Thanks for sharing that!
Ali
Teaching Powered by Caffeine
I'm still not sure how your inquiry wall works. Can you give some more details? Thanks!
Hi Alison, first you decide on a question or topic and that goes in the middle. Here we did, "What is inquiry". Then the students write down their ideas on sticky notes. You ask for one person to come up and place their idea on the wall. Then you ask if others have similar ideas and they post their sticky notes near the first sticky. Then you ask for someone who has an idea that doesn't fit in with the first sticky and they come up and post it on the wall (or white board etc.) somewhere away from the first sticky and you repeat the process of having people who have similar ideas come up and post their sticky notes near that one. It goes on until all the stickies are on the wall. You will find that some sticky notes can go anywhere and students will make connection among ideas. It's simply a way to get students talking about the question and it can also help you determine common misconceptions among students. It can help the teacher determine where to go next in an inquiry and what the students already know, what they seem to know little about and what misconceptions they have. Does that help?