Space Inquiry Immersion

Before starting any investigating in this big curricular inquiry, I explain the different inquiry stages that we will be going through.

In a nutshell:

Our brains are like sponges in the Immersion Stage.  We are soaking up any learning we can find.
At the end of this stage, we think about lingering questions that we would like to answer.

We research to find answers to our questions in the Investigation Stage.
Often we are grouped by interest in Research Groups at this stage.

In the Coalesce Stage we start organizing our thinking and research.

When we are in the Go Public Stage, we are sharing our learning with others and teaching our new schema.

We start the Immersion Stage with solely books.  As an introduction to our nonfiction text features unit in Reading Workshop, we talk about how when we are looking at books where the words are too challenging, the headings give us a clue to what each section is about.  As first grade readers, many of us need to infer using pictures and reading headings and captions for further clues.

This is definitely an exciting stage--many of the pictures didn't even turn out because the kids were moving so fast to share their learning with others!

During the immersion stage we sorted all of the research we had written on sticky notes.

Later, we immersed ourselves in various space stations.  We explored models, puzzles, legos, and more!

Here is a video of the immersion stage in our Space Inquiry.  Enjoy!

Strong Collaboration Skills

We have been working on fine-tuning our Turn & Talk skills.  We came up with this anchor chart to describe what good partners do during our Turn & Talk times.

We also added a new idea to our collaboration skills chart:  compromise.

When several partnerships started to display the art of compromise, we added it to our collaboration chart and discussed this important skill as a group.

Our guidance counselor, Mrs. Keup, shared a great video to further explain compromise.

Published Authors!

We have been working on fixing and fancying up our favorite personal narrative stories to publish.

We even added blurbs on the back!

We were so excited to read each other's stories.

 We are so proud of our work as published authors!

Dick Proenneke

We have been reading Little House on the Prairie during our Snack/Read Aloud time.

The Ingalls family traveled all the way from the big woods of Wisconsin to a homestead near Independence, Kansas.

We have gotten to one of my favorite parts of the book, which is when Pa builds their log cabin.

Undoubtedly at this point in the book after seeing the above picture, one of the kids makes a connection about Lincoln Logs.

I pulled out the Lincoln Logs from our storage room and the kids started building and exploring. 

Here is a picture of the re-creation of Little House on the Prairie in Kansas, near Independence.

Next, I introduced them to a movie about a man named Dick Proenneke.  

He was a man who decided to test himself to see if he could live off the land, all alone in Alaska.  He built a cabin from scratch, using only hand tools--he brought the steel parts of the tools, but even built the handles of the tools with local wood.  We learned that he was a mathematician when he measured and constructed the cabin, as well as a writer because he recorded his life and experiences in journals.

Today we got to see him building his cabin in the documentary Alone in the Wilderness.

The kids were in awe as we watched him chop and saw, carry tree trunks, construct his log cabin, build a fireplace, make furniture...just like Pa in Little House on the Prairie!

To learn more about Dick Proenneke and his adventures in the Alaskan Wilderness:

click these words to learn more about purchasing the documentary

click these words to learn more about his life

click these words to be taken to the National Park website where his cabin is located

click these words to go to a youtube search for various videos about Dick Proenneke

or watch this youtube video below:

Do you think you could do something like Dick Proenneke?

Activating our Space Schema

Before we get started on our first big inquiry on space, I like to discuss activating our schema.  When we activate our schema, we access any and all "space files" in our brains.  We read a few books like Sun & Moon by Marcus Pfister.  I like this book because it has a lot of little facts built into the fictional story, and it gets kids thinking and sparks ideas of what they think they already know (schema).

We brainstorm a few ideas together, and watch the following video.


This video never fails to intrigue them and activate more schema.

 Then, we go off and illustrate some of our schema.

Once we have worked on our schema, we walk around and see what schema others have.

Next, we need to talk about what resources will help us in our mission to learn about space.
This is the list that they came up with (you can tell they have had many experiences with smaller inquiries!):

We discussed areas of our classroom library that we would likely find books about space. Then, we worked as a team to gather book resources in our own classroom.  Collaboration!

We're ready to start our research!