I have a small class of LD students who are all on iPads. We're just embarking on the questioning phase of the Inquiry Process, partly because I wanted to build up their background knowledge first. Let me explain further.
While at the tail end of our Conservation of Energy unit, after reading a chapter from the text book that mentioned Global Warming, I asked my students if they had ever heard of the term and I immediately saw thumbs down across the room. Sensing one of those golden teachable moments, I quickly and purposefully pulled some images up like the ones below to pull at their heart strings. Boy, did it work!! They couldn't believe that global warming could hurt these animals.
While at the tail end of our Conservation of Energy unit, after reading a chapter from the text book that mentioned Global Warming, I asked my students if they had ever heard of the term and I immediately saw thumbs down across the room. Sensing one of those golden teachable moments, I quickly and purposefully pulled some images up like the ones below to pull at their heart strings. Boy, did it work!! They couldn't believe that global warming could hurt these animals.
Soooo, over the next couple of days I put together a little package via ThingLink to show the students some short videos about global warming, what it is (aka greenhouse gases), and some of the different environmental effects. I got the videos from Britannica. We discussed what we were learning through the videos and I recorded their questions on our Wonder Wall.
Their big question--"Can we stop global warming?"
Their big question--"Can we stop global warming?"
Our next step will be to discuss types of questions. I will introduce our three question categories (Google, Search & Find, and Wicked Wonders) by using their questions; I will ask the students how easy or difficult it will be to find the answers to them. We'll see how this goes.
Well, it went very well in fact! The kids were very attune to the three types of questions. They could easily and accurately explain each type and provide examples. We sorted their questions with relative ease.
Then I gave them an assortment of questions that I had devised based on curriculum examples from the grade 5 social studies Government unit. Working in groups, the kids determined which category their various questions would fit into. After, I checked their sorting. For the most part, they sorted the majority of questions correctly. The odd question that was in a wrong category became the centre of discussion as we either left it or moved it to a different category, depending on the reasoning given by the group who had originally had it. Again, I was very impressed.
After all of this practice with questioning, I was sure the students would ace a little assessment about their knowledge of the types of questions. Check out our Socrative test called "Questions, Questions" (Quiz #SOC-18993253). Sadly, they did not fare very well at all on this assessment. Perhaps they could not synthesize the categorization of random, generic questions since we had only been talking about global warming previously. My bad--should have done a Space Race first (it's a Socrative thing).
Laura