C4T #3

Jennifer's blog

C4T # 3

Jennifer Brokofs Building A Culture of Wonder: Inquiry in Primary Education

 This is a great blog post.  It's probably the most interesting one I've read since enrolling in this class.  Jennifer feels children are born inquisitive.  They are always asking ''why?". As young children, they enter school asking "why" to almost everything.  As teachers we should make time and space in our classroom for their wondering. They need to know it's okay to ask questions and we want them to do so in classrooms. Jennifer wanted to encourage this wonder in her classroom and came up with the great idea of  the Wonder Wall, the Wonder Words, the Wonder Center, and  Wonder of the Week. 
The Wonder wall is a place where group questions can be shared, encouraged and recorded.
The Wonder of the Week is a place to post questions for discussion and initiate thinking.
The Wonder Words are used as sentence starters and encourage a sense of wonder.
The Wonder Center is a collection of objects to fit in with current classroom units. 
The Wonder Center  is a place where thinking can be recorded in Wonder Journals, Wonder cards, sentence starters and Science notebooks. 

 This idea sounds a lot  like one Dr. Strange told us about seeing in Andy Capps classroom.

This blog is full of ideas to use in the classroom.  I am so excited about the many uses of the Wonder Wall.  I believe children will become excited too and want to participate. This idea will not take a great deal of effort to do with young children because of the natural curiosity they already have and bring to class with them.  I commented to Jennifer that I was also adding her blog to my PLN as she is a good resource and I look forward to reading more of her blog post.

 Using the Picture Word Inductive Model to Connect Math to the World

This is a powerful approach for teaching and learning in Language Arts. Photographs provide amazing opportunities to look into a different place,culture and experience and then connect that to the learning in those subject areas. Jennifer believes it can be used to support teaching and learning in Mathematics. Teachers and students try to connect the math in classrooms to math in the world and this may be a way to do so. The photographs provide a window in to the world and this window can be opened to mathematics.

This can be a great learning tool. For example, if a 1st grader saw a picture of a market, math is everywhere. There is math in the street, the produce, the shapes, the people and everywhere. If you look at the picture through a math "window" a teacher can see several math outcomes that can be explored. Student could discuss why we want to know this type of information. It's all in the way that you look at the photograph. Great idea that would simplify concepts for some students.