Tag: Inquiry-Based Learning
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Defining the Elephant in the Room: What, Exactly, is Close Reading?
After months of research and soul-searching, I’ve come to the realization that I can’t use the terminology of “close reading” in my classes any longer. This has been a long journey for me, as I’ve tried to understand what “close reading” is or should be, and I’ve grown to believe that whatever it is, it…
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The Value of Talk
The other day, my daughter called and asked me about a recipe. We chatted about its origin, and recalled a funny story that went with it. Our lively conversation had stemmed from a simple question. Recently, I’ve been paying close attention to questions and their resulting conversations. “Do you have an idea for your digital…
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Time Well Spent
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,…
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The Writing Is Small, But the Work Is Big
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…
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Alligator in the Classroom
This 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…
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21st Century Literacy: Just Go With It!
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…