We are curious!

Inquiry is our opportunity to spread our wings and explore a wide range of topics and ideas from across the curriculum. 

This week, we embarked on a brand new inquiry cycle that we will stay with, in different forms, throughout the school year. Here's our Inquiry Model:

We begin in the 'I am curious' part of the cycle, with a stimulus that will encourage us to ask some juicy questions. This week, we did some thinking about words like 'who', 'when', 'where', 'which', 'what' and 'how'. Later, we discovered some interesting maps, atlases and globes in our classroom. We had lots of questions and were able to use our question words to help us to say what our wonderings were.

The map of Aotearoa sparked a lot of interest with questions about locations we had visited, and also the birds and animals shown on it. Is a kiwi really fluffy? Where is Splash Planet in Hastings? Where does my grandma live? Where is Upper Hutt? 

There were also questions about the pictures of ships and waka that we'd added to the display. Who did they belong to? What were they? We chatted about trips we'd made by ferry, car and plane.

The globe prompted a more geological line of questioning: is this a planet? How close is the sun to the earth? Why does the earth have earthquakes.

We collected all of these questions on postits. As we move into the 'I am exploring' phase of our inquiry cycle, we hope to burrow into as many of them as we can. Some will be mini inquiries that we can explore in a short time; others are more chunky and will take a little longer. We may follow a few mini inquiry cycles.

One area that has sparked a lot of interest is finding the places where people in our family live or have connections. We will definitely need some whānau help with this, so please keep an eye out on Seesaw and email for more on this topic. In the meantime, why not begin a conversation at home about the places that are important to your family. We are curious to know more!