I was speaking with a friend of mine and fellow co-worker, Tracy, about when its a good time to blog. I told her once I find inspiration I begin writing a draft. My inspiration came today in my classroom of 3rd graders. I was so proud of the work that they did.
My team and I are trying to move to more inquiry based lessons. Inspired by a fellow co-worker I worked on changing my lesson to be more inquiry based. The current lesson is very scripted. Students typically follow a cookbook type lab sheet, but not today!
As a whole class we worked on what question we wanted to answer and we all agreed on one testable question. Together on the rug we developed our own hypothesis and students "drew" what their experiment would look like. As a whole group we talk about what materials we need to test out and agreed on four types of surfaces. Finally we decided together on what was the best why to collect data, so we made a data table.
I let the CHEFS go at it! They worked hard on their experiments. After some time we came together and placed our data on the class data chart. We worked on how to find the average and did a simple line graph. Once we visually saw the data we worked together to write our conclusion. All in 2.5 hours!
If your wondering more about inquiry based learning NSTA (National Science Teachers Association) has some great resources available to members and a limited to nonmembers. My favorite article is called Folding Inquiry into Cookbook Lab Activities by Julia Goodlin and Bill Metz. Check it out!
To see examples of my students science notebooks click on the link "Science team"
Awesome, Sandy! So glad the students inspired you today! I'm glad you've taken an inquiry risk!
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