History of Thanksgiving Inquiry

Room 408 has done a few mini-inquiries to "get their feet wet" researching.  These mini-inquiries have all been started and completed in one day's worth of Research Workshop.  Our History of Thanksgiving inquiry spanned about 5 days of Research Workshops, so we get experience visiting a bigger topic, dealing with lingering questions, and following our personal questions as we research.

As usual, we started our Thanksgiving inquiry by sharing our schema (what we think we know).  This is a time for brainstorming our schema, and we learn that it's okay to agree and disagree with each other.  

It also sets us up to talk about finding evidence that confirms our thinking...

...or helps us to understand that sometimes we have misconceptions and have to delete that schema file from our brains and create a new file.

Brainstorming our schema also helps me figure out what types of resources I'll need to gather.  As we brainstormed, it seemed that a lot of our History of Thanksgiving  schema centered on the Mayflower.  

We studied a cutaway of the Mayflower to look for clues and learn more.

When we found something interesting, we highlighted it.

 We also made sure to read the labels.

Before we knew it, we were so excited that we couldn't help sharing our findings with others!

Next, we visited the Scholastic First Thanksgiving site for a virtual tour of the Mayflower and to learn more about the journey of the pilgrims. Click on these words to visit the site.

As we learned something new, we would go back to our Mayflower cutaway and try to find it.

Over the next few days we immersed ourselves (the Immersion Stage) in all sorts of  photographs, books, magazines, and videos about the first Thanksgiving.

About halfway through the inquiry, we discussed the lingering questions that we had.  They were wondering things like:
How did they get to the shore?
Where did they land?
What kinds of foods did they have?
Who were the Wampanoags?
Why did so many of the pilgrims die?
What was the first Thanksgiving like?
Were there people living there already?

During the Investigation Stage, they pursued answers to their lingering questions.

During the Coalesce Stage we had a lot of discussions about our thinking and were able to confirm our thinking by finding evidence in videos and books.

Here are some of our favorite videos:

Our Go Public Stage is when we teach others about what we learned.  We made Story of the First Thanksgiving bracelets/necklaces to share with our families over Thanksgiving Break.

We were proud of our bracelets and necklaces!

Happy Thanksgiving!