Sunday, March 11, 2018

Take Advantage When Opportunities Arise



In her book, The Power of Inquiry, Kath Murdoch has a chart of what inquiry teachers do. One of those things is to link investigation to authentic contexts (p. 21).

This has been a focus of mine for this current unit. The phrase jumped out at me because I missed out on one such opportunity about five years ago, and I have probably missed out on many opportunities since then, but I have always thought about that missed chance. Hopefully, regretting that missed chance has helped me be more confident in taking risks with my teaching and looking for opportunities when they arise.

The other day I may have caught the opportunity.

The Junior High was having a Pancake Bake Sale fundraiser, but it was during recess time. The schedule worked out so that Grade 1 had class during this time. My students were not too pleased with this development and I got an earful coming up the stairs.

We are currently looking at opinion writing, so I decided to try to make a connection to our writing by telling them that they should make their voices heard by writing letters. I gave them a choice of three people to whom they could write and set them up by saying that they should think about:

Who - who will they write to
What - what they want
Why - why they want it

There was only about 15 minutes of writing time until an assembly, and some students were not into it since we had already "done writing" in the morning. But some students were able to express themselves. And hopefully, the others started to realize that the different subjects are interconnected throughout the unit.

* While not exactly an authentic inquiry, I think it was an authentic context for which I could guide the students to make a connection. It was probably as close I could get with this group.

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