Chippewa River Writing Project
A site of the National Writing Project at Central Michigan University
Time. There’s never enough of it, is there? Whenever I talk to teachers about my efforts to use an inquiry approach to teaching, they almost always ask, “How do you find the time?” To be honest, it isn’t easy. As I mentioned in my earlier posts, before the surprise alligator head hijacked my students’ attention, […]
Continue Reading
In my last two blog posts (21st Century Literacy and Alligator in the Classroom), I began to tell the story of a shared inquiry project on the American Alligator that my first grade students and I engaged in last winter. The project began when a parent of one of my students brought a preserved alligator head […]
Continue ReadingThis is the second in a series of posts about inquiry-based learning in the first grade classroom. In my last blog post I wrote about the day a student’s dad surprised my first grade class with a preserved alligator head. The surprise developed into an inquiry project through which my students had the opportunity to […]
Continue Reading
Anyone who teaches young children knows that when a parent walks into the classroom with a preserved alligator’s head, you have to drop everything you had planned to do and just go with it. That is exactly what happened in my first grade classroom last February. A student’s dad had been working in Louisiana since […]
Continue Reading