Seasons: our new inquiry

This term, we've embarked on a brand new inquiry into the seasons of the year.

In this blog, you'll get a taste of how our thinking has evolved so far, and some background to some of the ideas that our Autahi students might be asking you about at home. I'm also going to try to give you a sense of how Inquiry learning works in our space.

Here is our inquiry model. You have probably seen it on our classroom walls. Sometimes an inquiry can take us around the cycle a few times.

We begin with 'I am curious'.

This is a questioning and wondering phase of the cycle. Sometimes questions arise spontaneously from children's interests. Sometimes, we try to give the children experiences to pique their curiosity. For this inquiry, we went to the theatre to see the show 'Seasons'.

After the show, we did lots of chatting and retelling about our favourite parts of the show. We talked about what we know about the seasons. We thought about the weather.

And also about the different creatures at different times of the year, like Tui laying their eggs in spring - and spiders (the enormous, hairy spider in the show was a big hit!).

We began to collect and share our questions about the seasons and add them to our inquiry wall. Lots of people are interested in the sun, for example.

We know that there will be more questions to add as we learn more.

We realised that we all mostly know that there are four seasons in New Zealand but we're not totally sure about how nature changes in each one. We did some seasons art to help us to think some more about this problem. 

We started exploring our current season, Spring, by doing some planting and growing.

We also went down to our beach to see what nature is doing at the seaside right now, and we've been sketching hedgerow plants from around our school.

We have also begun to respond to some of those questions about the sun, for example who made it and what is it made from? Why is it hotter in some seasons and cooler in others? Here we are having a go at some fiery sun art.

Our questioning and exploring phase continues, and you might find that your child comes home with some questions and ideas prompted by our topic. Ask them about what we've been doing at school and have a chat about their thoughts. Please do feed back to Beth and Carl as we'd love to follow up their wonderings at school, too. That way, we can all live this rich inquiry topic!