The Inquiry Cycle

At Worser Bay School we use an inquiry cycle to help us with our new learning in inquiry. Each stage leads into the next and helps to guide our learning to the next stage.
Today I'll give you a brief outline of each step and what that looks like in Autahi.

We start our cycle at the curiosity stage. Here we start with provocations that get us thinking and asking questions. We want to find out what people already know and focus our inquiry on exploring the things that we don't know yet. Yet is that keyword because it tells us that it is possible for us to know. We just need to do a little exploring to find out. At the curiosity stage we try to work out which questions are really rich and full of lots of opportunities for us.




Then once we have found a question to hone in on, we begin the exploring stage. Here we start to look at ways we can find out the answers to our questions and maybe even develop more questions to deepen our inquiry. We look at pictures and try our hand at drawing our ideas. Books are a great resource for finding out new things.

We might watch a video, especially if it is about a topic that we can't visit like the bottom of the ocean.
We take trips and meet with experts to ask our questions.

Next we move on to sorting and creating.

Here we take some of our new learning start to loom at ways we can create new things to show our learning. Here we are experimenting with some learning about the sun and how it's light shines on the earth.

We looked at ways we can get into space and decided building a rocket might help us on our journey.

Finally the last stage is celebrating where we reflect on our learning and share or findings with others. We use Seesaw as a great tool to share our learning and you will see this grow over time as we put up lots of examples of our learning.