inspiring inquiry classrooms

Every Wednesday morning we have a late start at school - the kids come in at 8:30 instead of 7:45 and our ES faculty meets together for some PD. It's pretty great and keeps everyone involved in the learning process. A few weeks ago, one part of our PD was to take a walk around the school and note examples of inquiry in other classrooms. 

How often do you think to just walk through another teacher's classroom? Just to see what's up, what's been happening? Do you feel comfortable doing so? With seven grade three classrooms, I'm lucky because I get to see quite a lot just bouncing around in the grade level. It was such a great experience to open up all the doors so we could browse around all classes from Pre-K to grade 4. Walk-throughs are something that our elementary school is trying to implement as an open form of communication, investigation, and professional inquiry, and I LOVE it! Here are just a few of the inspiring ideas I saw around:

This display uses cover images of picture books the class used to explore Measurement, with a list of student-written measurement tools below.

A simple but inquiry-focused graphic organizer - for anything! Nothing says inquiry like question starts.

One of our Transdisciplinary Skills displayed with the ActivBoard web from class discussion. You can't really see it, but the kids all added an index-card reflecting on a time when they successfully used Connection and Collaboration in their own lives.

Totally want to make this for my room. Reflection is such a difficult skill, but is so important, and this is a great way to help students frame their thinking.

Mathematical Practices posted with student-generated definitions/understanding below.

Project to show personal inquiry into How-To/Sequence writing. This is a great way for students to really separate the steps of the process visually.

Love the idea of taking big questions the kids have asked ("When did you start to think?" "What is the difference between the truth and a lie?" "What is imagination?") that maybe don't fit in nicely with any of your curriculum content and making them meaningful.

Students address one of this unit's Essential Questions.

Using a See Think Wonder routine to help students inquire into a graph they find personally interesting.

Again - great reflection tool. I'm thinking I should make goal-setting/reflection my professional goal for next school year!

Wondering Wall

Grand finale - one more tool for reflection!

Art Walk

Last year my super-husband, Jeff, organized a school-wide Art walk that was a big success. 
Basically every class made and displayed some artwork.
It was up to the teachers to come up with the project.
Everyone was so creative!
Parents took guided tours with our high school student-guides.
Everything looked so great up on the walls that they decided to do it again.
Here's some of the great work around the school this year!

Oil pastel with water colour - grade 2

Outline chalk flowers - grade 2

2D cities - grade 1

Tessellations - "School of fish" - grade 1

Van Gogh water colours - grade 2

Van Gogh pastels - grade 2

We also create a collaborative piece as a fundraiser for the school.

These get framed and are auctioned off to parents during our Spring Concert.

Kandinsky - grade 2

Self Portraits - SK

Balloons - grade 1

Cityscape - my favourite!

Hot air balloon - SK

I didn't get around to every hallway, so most of this is just from my primary end.

Pretty great stuff!